Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother.
ADRIENNE RICHThe so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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What I’m finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written – out of and amid the dysfunction.
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When someone, let’s say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it’s like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.
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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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A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women’s movement, for instance, becoming “support-groups” or therapy groups.
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All new learning looks at first like chaos.
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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 mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
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There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.
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Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.
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Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.
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[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who – for whatever reasons – are less conscious of what they are living through.
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A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
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Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative – that we’re just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different – that this is human destiny, this is human nature.
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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
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The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power.
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No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.
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Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.
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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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The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.
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When men – insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea – have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included
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Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
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I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say ‘I’; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.
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Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.
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The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
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I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
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Strangers are an endangered species.
ADRIENNE RICH