Women’s art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community.
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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In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe.
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The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.
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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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The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
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Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.
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The marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
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In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
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It 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.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.
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he ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves.
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Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.
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There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
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Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
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Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
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Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
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We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.
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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.
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No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
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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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TV has created a kind of false collectivity.
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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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Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
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A knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.
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To allow what you’re reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers.
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Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others.
ADRIENNE RICH