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.
ADRIENNE RICHChange is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.
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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
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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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A book of poems doesn’t just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.
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Any woman’s death diminishes me.
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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 believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing.
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What we see, we see and seeing is changing
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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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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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I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.
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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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An honorable human relationship … 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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Women’s art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community.
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To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
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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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Strangers are an endangered species.
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What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.
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Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present.
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The so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?
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If poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.
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Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler – for the liar – than it really is, or ought to be.
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It iscrucial that we understand lesbian/feminism in the deepest, most radical sense: as that love for ourselves and other women, that commitment to the freedom of all of us, which transcends the category of “sexual preference” and the issue of civil rights.
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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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Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.
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We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference.
ADRIENNE RICH