To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.
ADRIENNE RICHPoems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
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Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
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The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
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Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem.
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Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?
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Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
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The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.
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It is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.
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Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
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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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When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
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Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions – whether of sex, race, or servitude.
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How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
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One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else.
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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.
ADRIENNE RICH