One line typed twenty years ago Adrienne Rich More Quotes by Adrienne Rich More Quotes From Adrienne Rich To become a token woman - whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters - is to become something less than a man... since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest. Adrienne Rich self winning men The belief that established science and scholarship--which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making--are "objective"and "value-free" and that feminist studies are "unscholarly," "biased," and "ideological" dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture! Adrienne Rich feminist culture art When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing. Adrienne Rich mirrors teacher world Go back so far there is another language Adrienne Rich language enough Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole. Adrienne Rich running children past Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine Adrienne Rich whatever-happens mines body The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness. Adrienne Rich loneliness liars lying What kind of beast would turn its life into words? Adrienne Rich beast turns kind 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, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult. Adrienne Rich writing mean art 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. Adrienne Rich choices father children 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. Adrienne Rich daughter mother two The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five. Adrienne Rich nineteen twilight long How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying. To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention. Adrienne Rich intelligent lying thinking Only to have a grief equal to all these tears! Adrienne Rich women tears grief The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle. Adrienne Rich struggle song art War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. Adrienne Rich political imagination war A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'” Adrienne Rich artist honor people Experience is always larger than language. Adrienne Rich experience language Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life. Adrienne Rich knives cake mind Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom. Adrienne Rich political intellectual challenges
