I’d call it love if love didn’t take so many years but lust too is a jewel.
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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A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
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The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.
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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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The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
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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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I feel more helpless with you than without you.
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When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders … then I began to wonder
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I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.
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I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.
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It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
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I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.
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The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
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A language is a map of our failures.
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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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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
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If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
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The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual – all of that fermenting together.
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We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn’t themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too “political,” “merely” oral and thus unreliable.
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Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single “I” or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.
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I don’t want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won’t deal with it.
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What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.
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It is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.
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The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from “Transcendental Etude
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Lying is done with words and also with silence.
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Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
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The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn’t there a difficulty of saying ‘we’? You cannot speak for me.
ADRIENNE RICH