Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
ADRIENNE RICHTo write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence– words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected – pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.
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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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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
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The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
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It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
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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 dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.
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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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Whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?
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When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
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Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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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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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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We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
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The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life.
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Just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc.
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Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
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Even where love has run thin the child’s soul musters strength… the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.
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In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment – not just in poetry – into the personal.
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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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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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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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It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.
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Any woman’s death diminishes me.
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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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TV has created a kind of false collectivity.
ADRIENNE RICH