We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn’t themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too “political,” “merely” oral and thus unreliable.
ADRIENNE RICHYou have to give your art everything you can – I don’t mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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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Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.
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The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
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Most of them, though not all, arewhite and male. But even as American society is unravelling, becoming more violent and punitive, wonderful political poetshave been emerging.
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Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler – for the liar – than it really is, or ought to be.
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We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
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Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience.
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The mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
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Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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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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An honorable human relationship … is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
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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.
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In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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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In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
ADRIENNE RICH