No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
ADRIENNE RICHI’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits.
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Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
ADRIENNE RICH -
[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.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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 RICH -
If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.
ADRIENNE RICH -
But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.
ADRIENNE RICH -
There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice…In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
ADRIENNE RICH