I don’t want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won’t deal with it.
ADRIENNE RICHWhite 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.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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.
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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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We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
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and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.
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When someone, let’s say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it’s like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.
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We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference.
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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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Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.
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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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What we see, we see and seeing is changing
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Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler – for the liar – than it really is, or ought to be.
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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
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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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Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem.
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I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There’s always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.
ADRIENNE RICH