Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
ADRIENNE RICHDespair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.
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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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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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Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants.
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The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn’t there a difficulty of saying ‘we’? You cannot speak for me.
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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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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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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 connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
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We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
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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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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.
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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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In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
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The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.
ADRIENNE RICH