Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?
ADRIENNE RICHWhen we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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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Women’s art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community.
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The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.
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It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
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The revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
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We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
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if we are unaware that women even have a history–we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.
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I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women’s movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history.
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A huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.
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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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When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart.
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Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.
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To do something very common, in my own way.
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The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
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I don’t trust them but I’m learning to use them.
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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are.
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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
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I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say ‘I’; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.
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A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
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Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.
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To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.
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Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
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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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What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.
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Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
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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.
ADRIENNE RICH