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.
ADRIENNE RICHIt is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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I don’t trust them but I’m learning to use them.
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I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class.
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The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
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Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
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The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
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It takes some strength of soul–and not just individual strength, but collective understanding–to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.
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The revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
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Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
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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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Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
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To do something very common, in my own way.
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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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False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.
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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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The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.
ADRIENNE RICH






