Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity.
ADRIENNE RICHif 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.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world.
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We have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.
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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
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Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
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Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
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What it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.
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I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from “Splittings
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Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
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The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
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Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
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An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”- 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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A knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.
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The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
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I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don’t mean that everyone can write poetry – it’s an art, a craft.
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Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
ADRIENNE RICH