War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
ADRIENNE RICHThere being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?
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Most of them, though not all, arewhite and male. But even as American society is unravelling, becoming more violent and punitive, wonderful political poetshave been emerging.
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All new learning looks at first like chaos.
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Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single “I” or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.
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The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
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If, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens.
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Only where there is language is there world.
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When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.
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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.
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The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics.
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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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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.
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If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.
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In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
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The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
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So endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
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When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders … then I began to wonder
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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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Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.
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Practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
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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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We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
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How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
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I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child
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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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Re-vision — the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
ADRIENNE RICH