This is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
ADRIENNE RICHThese scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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.
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It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.
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It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
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Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
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To become a politics of asking women’s questions, demanding a world in which the integrity of all women–not a chosen few–shall be honored and validated in every respect of culture.
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The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.
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“What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?” Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?
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One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else.
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We’ve learned a lot from the great psychologists. Wilhelm Reich wrote about the relationship between fascism and sexual repression.
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We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
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The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics.
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The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.
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Life on the planet is born of woman.
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The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.
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Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It iscrucial that we understand lesbian/feminism in the deepest, most radical sense: as that love for ourselves and other women, that commitment to the freedom of all of us, which transcends the category of “sexual preference” and the issue of civil rights.
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We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference.
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To allow what you’re reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.
ADRIENNE RICH -
A language is a map of our failures.
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Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.
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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
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It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand.
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False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.
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There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.
ADRIENNE RICH