As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.
ADRIENNE RICHFor now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
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Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
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Since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.
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We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
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Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
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Experience is always larger than language.
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In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
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Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single “I” or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.
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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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But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?
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A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
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Some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand–a center of gravity.
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What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.
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For now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
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A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
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We have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.
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If, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens.
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Just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc.
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In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it’s the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.
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Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
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The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
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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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An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”- 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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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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The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political
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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
ADRIENNE RICH