Adrienne Rich Quotes
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I am suspicious - first of all, in myself - of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people's tendency to ... vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other 'exotic' ways of understanding.
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in the nineteenth year and the eleventh month speak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides: Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel on ones we knew and loved Praise to life though its windows blew shut on the breathing-room of ones we knew and loved Praise to life though ones we knew and loved loved it badly, too well, and not enough Praise to life though it tightened like a knot on the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us Praise to life giving room and reason to ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable. Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could.
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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.
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We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
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A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
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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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Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we're not young.
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I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.
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We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.
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In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.
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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, 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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A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
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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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One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, 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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The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
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Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
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In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
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Strangers are an endangered species.
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To do something very common, in my own way.
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The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
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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: 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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As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.
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Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.
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Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother's; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
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Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?
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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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In the middle-class United States, a veneer of "alternative lifestyles" disguises the reality that, here as everywhere, women's apparent "choices" whether or not to have children are still dependent on the far from neutral will of male legislators, jurists, a male medical and pharmaceutical profession, well-financed lobbies, including the prelates of the Catholic Church, and the political reality that women do not as yet have self-determination over our bodies and still live mostly in ignorance of our authentic physicality, our possible choices, our eroticism itself.
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Any woman's death diminishes me.
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