We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless.
ADRIENNE RICHWe have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn’t themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too “political,” “merely” oral and thus unreliable.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
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Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
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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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Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.
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Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap.
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The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
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Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present.
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The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits.
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Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
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Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity.
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The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn’t there a difficulty of saying ‘we’? You cannot speak for me.
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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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The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.
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I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
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Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
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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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To become a politics of asking women’s questions, demanding a world in which the integrity of all women–not a chosen few–shall be honored and validated in every respect of culture.
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The password is a flicker of an eyelash.
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The moment of change is the only poem.
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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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The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
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I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don’t mean that everyone can write poetry – it’s an art, a craft.
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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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It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
ADRIENNE RICH