Re-vision — the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
ADRIENNE RICHIn the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment – not just in poetry – into the personal.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.
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I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say ‘I’; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.
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Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
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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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If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
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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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It is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.
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I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.
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Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation.
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We’ve learned a lot from the great psychologists. Wilhelm Reich wrote about the relationship between fascism and sexual repression.
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One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else.
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The ocean, whose tides respond, like women’s menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins.
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It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
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To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
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Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
ADRIENNE RICH