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Adrienne Rich
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“Love only what you do, / and not what you have done.”
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“... to be young / Was always to live in other peoples' houses / Whose peace, if we sought it, had been made by others, / Was ours at second-hand and not for long.”
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“A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.”
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“But lust too is a jewel / a sweet flower ...”
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“Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew, / Yankee nor Rebel.”
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“Only where there is language is there world.”
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“I wanted to choose words that even you / would have to be changed by ... ”
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“When they read this poem of mine, they are translators. / Every existence speaks a language of its own.”
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“A language is a map of our failures.”
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“Where language and naming are power, / silence is oppression, is violence.”
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“In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. ”
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“I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.”
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“... the moment of change is the only poem.”
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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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“... the faithfulness I can imagine would be a weed / flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing / the massed atoms of a bedrock disbelief.”
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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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“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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“Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.”
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“Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.”
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“Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work, waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.”
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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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“But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.”
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“Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other — beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival — 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 most notable fact that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.”
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“We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.”
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“Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.”
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“The mother's battle for her child — with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life — needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival. ”
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“Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.”
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“The rules break like a thermometer, / quicksilver spills across the charted systems, / we're out in a country that has no language / no laws, we're chasing the raven and the wren / through gorges unexplored since dawn / whatever we do together is pure invention / the maps they gave us were out of date / by years ...”
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“Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.”
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“No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.”
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“Marriage is lonelier than solitude.”
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“We have lived with violence far too long.”
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“But gentleness is active / gentleness swabs the crusted stump / invents more merciful instruments / to touch the wound beyond the wound.”
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“I choose to love this time for once / with all my intelligence.”
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“The decision to feed the world / is the real decision.”
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“... two women, eye to eye / measuring each other's spirit, each other's / limitless desire, / a whole new poetry beginning here.”
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“The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”
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“[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who — for whatever reasons — are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.”
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“Language is power ... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.”
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“Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.”
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“It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.”
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“... day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.”
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“One serious cultural obstacle encountered by any feminist writer is that each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. 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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“... people are growing up in the slack flicker of a pale light which lacks the concentrated burn of a candle flame or oil wick or the bulb of a gooseneck desk lamp: a pale, wavering, oblong shimmer, emitting incessant noise, which is to real knowledge or discourse what the manic or weepy protestations of a drunk are to responsible speech. Drunks do have a way of holding an audience, though, and so does the shimmery ill-focused oblong screen.”
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“Lying is done with words, and also with silence.”
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“There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth' — truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.”
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“When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”
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“The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness.”
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“The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious. ”
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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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“An honorable human relationship ... 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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“The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.”
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“The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.”
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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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“Anger and tenderness: my selves. / And now I can believe they breathe in me / as angels, not polarities. / Anger and tenderness: the spider's genius / to spin and weave in the same action / from her own body, anywhere — / even from a broken web.”
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“Strangers are an endangered species ...”
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“The woman / I needed to call my mother / was silenced before I was born. ”
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“Any woman's death diminishes me.”
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“I am writing this in a time / when anything we write / can be used against those we love / where the context is never given / though we try to explain, over and over ...”
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“As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.”
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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. ... The song is higher than the struggle, and the artist must choose between politics — here defined as earth-bound factionalism, corrupt power struggles — and art, which exists on some transcendent plane.”
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“I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.”
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“The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs ...”
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“If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.”
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“Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.”
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“A patriot is one who wrestles for the / soul of her country / as she wrestles for her own being, for the soul of his country / ... / as he wrestles for his own being.”
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“What does it mean to say I have survived / until you take the mirrors and turn them outward / and read your own face in their outraged light?”
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“Experience is always larger than language.”
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“Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young woman a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are the deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision. ”
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“Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.”
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“TV has created a kind of false collectivity.”
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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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“Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.”
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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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“I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.”
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“White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn't brought up to hate. But hate isn't the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness — 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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“War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation: thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”
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“It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism ... ”
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“Much that you need has been lost ... We must use what we have to invent what we desire.”
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“Falling in love on words / and ending in silence / with its double-meanings.”
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“... this is the oppressor's language / yet I need it to talk to you.”
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“The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death. / The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot.”
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“Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.”
Adrienne Rich, U.S. poet, essayist, feminist
(1929 - 2012)
Full name: Adrienne Cecile Rich.