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.
ADRIENNE RICHMy 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.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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Language is power… Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
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Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins,
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We’ve learned a lot from the great psychologists. Wilhelm Reich wrote about the relationship between fascism and sexual repression.
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It is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.
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The women’s movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked.
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The password is a flicker of an eyelash.
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There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.
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The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
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One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else.
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In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.
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I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.
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Any woman’s death diminishes me.
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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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The assumption that women are a subgroup, that men’s culture is the ‘real’ world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the ‘great’ or ‘liberalizing’ periods of history have been the same for women as for men.
ADRIENNE RICH