For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. Adrienne Rich More Quotes by Adrienne Rich More Quotes From Adrienne Rich The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs. Adrienne Rich adolescence sexuality limbs Strangers are an endangered species. Adrienne Rich species endangered-species stranger TV has created a kind of false collectivity. Adrienne Rich tvs kind television We have lived with violence far too long. Adrienne Rich violence long When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever. Adrienne Rich forever mean Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness Adrienne Rich biology keys ignorance 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. Adrienne Rich suicide heart years 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. Adrienne Rich white writing history ... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if 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. Adrienne Rich wind philosophy past False history gets made all day, any day, Adrienne Rich clay watches history Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. 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: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. Adrienne Rich survival eye self We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama. Adrienne Rich memories life way To do something very common, in my own way. Adrienne Rich my-own common way One line typed twenty years ago Adrienne Rich wall years art Weather abroad Adrienne Rich predictions heart weather It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack. Adrienne Rich creativity daughter father What would it mean to live Adrienne Rich cities hope mean ... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry. Adrienne Rich passion survival poetry When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand--a center of gravity. Adrienne Rich notebook prayer memories I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel. Adrienne Rich jewels sex years
