The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.
ADRIENNE RICHThe materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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 -
Freud rediscovered the underworld of consciousness that European rationalism had denied. But when you have a nation of people in therapy and counselling.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
ADRIENNE RICH -
A book of poems doesn’t just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
ADRIENNE RICH -
Some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand–a center of gravity.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
ADRIENNE RICH -
To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.
ADRIENNE RICH -
False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day … the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing.
ADRIENNE RICH -
When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors.
ADRIENNE RICH -
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
ADRIENNE RICH -
To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously.
ADRIENNE RICH