Strangers are an endangered species.
ADRIENNE RICHWhen 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.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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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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 think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don’t mean that everyone can write poetry – it’s an art, a craft.
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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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When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
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I feel more helpless with you than without you.
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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.
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Any woman’s death diminishes me.
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If poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.
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Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
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I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.
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We lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo’s Women’s War.
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A language is a map of our failures.
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The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
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Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
ADRIENNE RICH