Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.
ADRIENNE RICHStrangers are an endangered species.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
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To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.
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The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
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It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple
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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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I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.
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Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
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When 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
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Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience.
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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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To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.
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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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A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
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… this world gives no room to be what we dreamt of being
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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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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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Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants.
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My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. 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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Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
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A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
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There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then.
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Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.
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Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
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White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn’t brought up to hate. But hate isn’t the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness.
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Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
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Freud rediscovered the underworld of consciousness that European rationalism had denied. But when you have a nation of people in therapy and counselling.
ADRIENNE RICH