Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
ADRIENNE RICHResponsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
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The revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
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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.
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The so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?
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Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
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Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
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But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?
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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
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The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political
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Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
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We have lived with violence far too long.
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Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
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The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from “Transcendental Etude
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and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.
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To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.
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Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
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We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
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Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative – that we’re just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different – that this is human destiny, this is human nature.
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Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity.
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Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.
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The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.
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Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present.
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Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
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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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There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women’s bodies by men.
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As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow.
ADRIENNE RICH