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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.

Adrienne Rich

It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.
ADRIENNE RICH

Creativity Daughter Father Hack Lesbian
I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.
ADRIENNE RICH

Back Carbon Coming Head Keep Know
In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world.
ADRIENNE RICH

Book Country End Immediately Poet Remarkable War World Wrote
A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
ADRIENNE RICH

Choose Even Life One Tool Wrong
No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
ADRIENNE RICH

Consciousness Fathered Insider Institutions Masculine Really Woman
There is no ‘the truth,’ ‘a truth’–truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.
ADRIENNE RICH

Complexity Increasing One System Thing Truth
The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn’t there a difficulty of saying ‘we’? You cannot speak for me.
ADRIENNE RICH

Country Difficulty Further Movement Novelist People Phrases Realize Two Wolf
An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
ADRIENNE RICH

Delicate Honorable Human Love People Process Relationship Self Truth Two Violent
“What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?” Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?
ADRIENNE RICH

Each Explore Other Society Stake Stories Want
To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
ADRIENNE RICH

Darkness Found Light Rejecting Treasure
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Century Coming Country Culture Different Discerned Poetic Role Social Together Voice
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Dehumanized Gew Itself Know Obsessional Otherness Passion Primarily Quality Race Silence Topic White
Freud rediscovered the underworld of consciousness that European rationalism had denied. But when you have a nation of people in therapy and counselling.
ADRIENNE RICH

Consciousness Country Denied Nation People Rationalism Rediscovered Therapy Underworld
The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics.
ADRIENNE RICH

Arctic Deaadnededness Dead Doors Key Leftism Male Politics Revolution Tolerance Word
Or those who still believe that language is ‘only words’ and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.
ADRIENNE RICH

Believe Description Language Old Transform
All new learning looks at first like chaos.
ADRIENNE RICH

Chaos First Learning Look New

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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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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