It’s as if, in the mother’s eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:’You are there!’
ADRIENNE RICHAbortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope?– You yourself must change it.
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Life on the planet is born of woman.
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Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
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It is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.
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The ocean, whose tides respond, like women’s menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins.
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We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.
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if we are unaware that women even have a history–we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.
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The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from “Transcendental Etude
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We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference.
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Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions – whether of sex, race, or servitude.
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You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
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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 is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist’s relation to bread and blood. In this view.
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Practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
ADRIENNE RICH