A knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.
ADRIENNE RICHWhen the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Passion for survival is the great theme of women’s poetry.
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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.
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That primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.
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Only where there is language is there world.
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The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual – all of that fermenting together.
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What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.
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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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he ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves.
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A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
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if we are unaware that women even have a history–we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.
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Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
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There is already a gap between those with education and those without. Those with educational privilege can be seen as arrogant, remote, alien – and very often they believe themselves superior.
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We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
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When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders … then I began to wonder
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Experience is always larger than language.
ADRIENNE RICH