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.
ADRIENNE RICHCourage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.
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The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
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Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
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Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else.
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The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power.
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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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An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
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Some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand–a center of gravity.
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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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It takes some strength of soul–and not just individual strength, but collective understanding–to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.
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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 don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
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We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless.
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I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.
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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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Women’s art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community.
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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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There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist’s relation to bread and blood. In this view.
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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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There 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
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There is no ‘the truth’,’a truth’ – truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface.
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Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
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[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who – for whatever reasons – are less conscious of what they are living through.
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In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world.
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Even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?
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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
ADRIENNE RICH