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.
ADRIENNE RICHRe-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.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying.
ADRIENNE RICH -
If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
ADRIENNE RICH -
What we see, we see and seeing is changing
ADRIENNE RICH -
War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
ADRIENNE RICH -
To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence– words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Behind all art is an element of desire…Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art.
ADRIENNE RICH -
War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
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 -
So endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins,
ADRIENNE RICH -
The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits.
ADRIENNE RICH -
To become a token woman – whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters – is to become something less than a man.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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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Experience is always larger than language.
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We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
ADRIENNE RICH