I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
ADRIENNE RICHThat’s why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.
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It is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.
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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
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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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A huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.
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Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.
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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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Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.
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Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
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The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political
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What I’m finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written – out of and amid the dysfunction.
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I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives.
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I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing.
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Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
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You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.
ADRIENNE RICH