Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
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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It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
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If poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.
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Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
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The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.
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A language is a map of our failures.
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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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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
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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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That’s why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone.
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Even where love has run thin the child’s soul musters strength… the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.
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There is no ‘the truth,’ ‘a truth’–truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
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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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Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity.
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Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
ADRIENNE RICH