In a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
ADRIENNE RICHMothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
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We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.
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Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work.
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I define “politics” as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create – not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.
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The marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.
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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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As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.
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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.
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These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
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The mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
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They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide…?
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It requires enormous commitment like any art. But there’s a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It’s the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.
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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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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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Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
ADRIENNE RICH