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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 power… Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
ADRIENNE RICH

Changing Language Mean Reality Writing
We have lived with violence far too long.
ADRIENNE RICH

Lived Long Violence
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Difficulty Fundamental Intellectual Men Patrivincialism Patrochialism Perceptual Real Sexism
We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
ADRIENNE RICH

Desire Dream Invent Lose Success Use
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Brain Burn Deviant Girl Grammar Men Message Norm Standard Thinking Young
We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
ADRIENNE RICH

Amazement Both Complexity Confusion Daughter Mother
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Cost Forcibly Heterosexuality Imposed Poverty Subliminally Woman
Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation.
ADRIENNE RICH

Affirmation Culture Desolation Great History Human Kind Magic Mattered People Period Through Violence
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Looking Mirror Nothing Someone Speak Teacher World
Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
ADRIENNE RICH

Enough Language Longer Personal
We have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.
ADRIENNE RICH

Chosen Enter Envying Freedom Herself Identifies Imagine Room Think
The marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.
ADRIENNE RICH

Centuries Country Marriage Revolution Witch Worker
In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.
ADRIENNE RICH

Bodies Body Control Fully Human Intelligence Life Natural Order Physical Unity
War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
ADRIENNE RICH

Absolute Country Failure Imagination People Political Scientific War
It iscrucial that we understand lesbian/feminism in the deepest, most radical sense: as that love for ourselves and other women, that commitment to the freedom of all of us, which transcends the category of “sexual preference” and the issue of civil rights.
ADRIENNE RICH

Commitment Deepest Integrity Iscrucial Issue Lesbian Ourselves Radical Sense Understand
The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
ADRIENNE RICH

Body Erected Patriarchy Terrain Woman

What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion.

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What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion.

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Popular Authors

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