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.
ADRIENNE RICHBehind all art is an element of desire…Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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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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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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are.
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Lying is done with words and also with silence.
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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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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.
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It requires enormous commitment like any art. But there’s a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It’s the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.
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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
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What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
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Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
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In a society where some people are far more educated than others, in which public education is ill-funded – here I am speaking of the U.S. – while we build more and more prisons to incarcerate youth who ought to be in school.
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Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
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I feel more helpless with you than without you.
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Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.
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I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.
ADRIENNE RICH