The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power.
ADRIENNE RICHHeterosexuality 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.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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It’s as if, in the mother’s eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:’You are there!’
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One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.
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Just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc.
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What we see, we see and seeing is changing
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The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.
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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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Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
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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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Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler – for the liar – than it really is, or ought to be.
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If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.
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How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
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Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present.
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When men – insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea – have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included
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Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
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When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.
ADRIENNE RICH