If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.
ADRIENNE RICHThere must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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if we are unaware that women even have a history–we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.
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I don’t want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won’t deal with it.
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That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.
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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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Strangers are an endangered species.
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Waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.
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Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants.
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I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don’t mean that everyone can write poetry – it’s an art, a craft.
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Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
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I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from “Splittings
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You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
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We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
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It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
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When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors.
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The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.
ADRIENNE RICH






