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.
ADRIENNE RICHTo become a token woman – whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters – is to become something less than a man.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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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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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It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
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Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
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Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
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We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
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There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.
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To 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.
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Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
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Experience is always larger than language.
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A huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.
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When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart.
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We lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo’s Women’s War.
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You have to give your art everything you can – I don’t mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.
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I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
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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.
ADRIENNE RICH -
“Support” groups for every kind of human condition, where, in the clichés of that milieu, people “share” and “heal,” the question, “What for?”, “What now?” is no longer asked.
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When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
ADRIENNE RICH -
There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice…In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
ADRIENNE RICH -
How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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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To do something very common, in my own way.
ADRIENNE RICH -
What it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual – all of that fermenting together.
ADRIENNE RICH