No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are.
ADRIENNE RICHI believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother.
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It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
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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.
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That’s why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone.
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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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I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which ‘sexism’ is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed ‘patrivincialism’ or patrochialism.
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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.
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“What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?” Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?
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Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single “I” or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.
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We lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo’s Women’s War.
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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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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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Any woman’s death diminishes me.
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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
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A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women’s movement, for instance, becoming “support-groups” or therapy groups.
ADRIENNE RICH