That primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.
ADRIENNE RICHPoetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.
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There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist’s relation to bread and blood. In this view.
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No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
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Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
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What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.
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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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Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we’re not young.
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Our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.
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I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
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I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
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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.
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A knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.
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Even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?
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If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
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My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.
ADRIENNE RICH