Any woman’s death diminishes me.
ADRIENNE RICHIt iscrucial that we understand lesbian/feminism in the deepest, most radical sense: as that love for ourselves and other women, that commitment to the freedom of all of us, which transcends the category of “sexual preference” and the issue of civil rights.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
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In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.
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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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I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
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The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.
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In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
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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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Made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language – this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
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Our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.
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And perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.
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There’s been real hostility toward political poetry in the U.S., hostility or, at best, incomprehension. I’m speaking of those who have institutional power over what gets published, over grants andprizes and reviewing.
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I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines.
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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
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I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.
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Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.
ADRIENNE RICH