I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.
ADRIENNE RICHWhat I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions – whether of sex, race, or servitude.
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The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
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What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
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Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Re-vision — the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
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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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There is no ‘the truth’,’a truth’ – truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface.
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Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
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It’s as if, in the mother’s eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:’You are there!’
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No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
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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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Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
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Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation.
ADRIENNE RICH