Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.
ADRIENNE RICHOr those who still believe that language is ‘only words’ and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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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A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
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The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.
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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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Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
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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.
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This is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
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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.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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.
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I’ve known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us.
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What I’m finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written – out of and amid the dysfunction.
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So endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.
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No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
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Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.
ADRIENNE RICH