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.
ADRIENNE RICHPoems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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“Global culture” is of course not a culture: it’s the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.
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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
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So endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
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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.
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And perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.
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The ocean, whose tides respond, like women’s menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins.
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We lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo’s Women’s War.
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I define “politics” as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create – not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.
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Waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.
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Behind all art is an element of desire…Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art.
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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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Practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
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Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present.
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It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
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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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Freud rediscovered the underworld of consciousness that European rationalism had denied. But when you have a nation of people in therapy and counselling.
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You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.
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You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
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Show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.
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Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
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I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from “Splittings
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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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To do something very common, in my own way.
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The mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
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I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women’s movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history.
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The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
ADRIENNE RICH