Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions – whether of sex, race, or servitude.
ADRIENNE RICHTo do something very common, in my own way.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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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The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.
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The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.
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A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.’”
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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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I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child
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When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.
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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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The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
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There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then.
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To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.
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“Support” groups for every kind of human condition, where, in the clichés of that milieu, people “share” and “heal,” the question, “What for?”, “What now?” is no longer asked.
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Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others.
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The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.
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In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment – not just in poetry – into the personal.
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All new learning looks at first like chaos.
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It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.
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Even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?
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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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I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from “Splittings
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There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women’s bodies by men.
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When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.
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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
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The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
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I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class.
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Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
ADRIENNE RICH