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
ADRIENNE RICHWe 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.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
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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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Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
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No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should beginwith the simple exercises firstand slowly go on tryingthe hard ones.
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That primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.
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This is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
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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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There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
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And perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.
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Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation.
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The revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
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The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics.
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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.
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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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… this world gives no room to be what we dreamt of being
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It’s been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
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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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To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
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The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.
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To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously.
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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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Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep.
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When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.
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To become a politics of asking women’s questions, demanding a world in which the integrity of all women–not a chosen few–shall be honored and validated in every respect of culture.
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Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.
ADRIENNE RICH