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Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.

Adrienne Rich

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
ADRIENNE RICH

Failure Imagination Political Scientific War
When someone, let’s say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it’s like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.
ADRIENNE RICH

Looking Mirror Nothing Someone Speak Teacher World
Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
ADRIENNE RICH

Chamber Desire Feeling Locked Poetry Possibility Recharge Zone
I don’t want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won’t deal with it.
ADRIENNE RICH

Generation Idea Irrelevant Raised Succumb Tech Television
The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.
ADRIENNE RICH

Bodies Expediency Gaslight Instinct Mind Truth
And that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.
ADRIENNE RICH

Couse Deflect Juice Mind Respect Ritualized Soul Trivialization Word
Lying is done with words and also with silence.
ADRIENNE RICH

Integrity Liar Silence Truth Word
You 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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Art Everything Poet Poetic Reading Thinking Writing
I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say ‘I’; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.
ADRIENNE RICH

Collective Know Liberation Movement Say Speak Thought
Whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?
ADRIENNE RICH

Connectedness Creativity Human Love Sense Sexually
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 RICH

General History Male Merely Over Seen Themselves White Writing
We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
ADRIENNE RICH

Amazement Both Complexity Confusion Daughter Mother
These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
ADRIENNE RICH

Bear Destruction Longer Scar Witness
Our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.
ADRIENNE RICH

Cycle Feeling Process Revolutionary Running Still Thinking Transformative
In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.
ADRIENNE RICH

Conscious Cutting Interval Light Profane Revelation Self Stopped Time
I’d call it love if love didn’t take so many years but lust too is a jewel.
ADRIENNE RICH

Call Jewels Love Sex Tale Year

Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.

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Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.

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