That primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.
ADRIENNE RICHIt’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
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Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
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The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
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What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion.
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I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which ‘sexism’ is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed ‘patrivincialism’ or patrochialism.
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How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying.
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Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
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Waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.
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It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
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Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
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I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from “Splittings
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Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience.
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We have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
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When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.
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The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual – all of that fermenting together.
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It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
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Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
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Women’s art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community.
ADRIENNE RICH -
A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.’”
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I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives.
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I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child
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I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.
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Strangers are an endangered species.
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In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.
ADRIENNE RICH