There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then.
ADRIENNE RICHTo “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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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What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
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Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.
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The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
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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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No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
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Lying is done with words and also with silence.
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Only where there is language is there world.
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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
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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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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
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The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.
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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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If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
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Reality, the oppressor’s tongue.
ADRIENNE RICH