I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives.
ADRIENNE RICHAn honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.
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The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.
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Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother’s; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
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I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.
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We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation.
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I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
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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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… this world gives no room to be what we dreamt of being
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A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
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How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying.
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To become a token woman – whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters – is to become something less than a man.
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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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In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.
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What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.
ADRIENNE RICH