Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity.
ADRIENNE RICHIt is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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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If, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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 RICH -
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.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.
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Waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Re-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.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.
ADRIENNE RICH