There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
ADRIENNE RICHAs a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.
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The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
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It’s been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.
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My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which ‘sexism’ is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed ‘patrivincialism’ or patrochialism.
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We have lived with violence far too long.
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Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.
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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 women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
ADRIENNE RICH -
A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
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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. the pattern of the carpet is a surface.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It’s as if, in the mother’s eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:’You are there!’
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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