To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
ADRIENNE RICHIn a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother’s; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
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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.
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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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The assumption that women are a subgroup, that men’s culture is the ‘real’ world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the ‘great’ or ‘liberalizing’ periods of history have been the same for women as for men.
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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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Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
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My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
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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 do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?” Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?
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It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
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It takes some strength of soul–and not just individual strength, but collective understanding–to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.
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the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
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One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
ADRIENNE RICH