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Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich Quotes

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Famous Adrienne Rich Quotes

“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.”

ThinkingWorldTryingLyingCultureEasyAnswersFeminismMovementIntelligentIntentionDenyPassiveFullnessDegrade
Book:On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978
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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.”

WorldTryingBelieveStillsReasonEnoughPoetryLanguagePoetDescriptionGood EnoughSocial Change
Book:On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978
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“It iscrucial that we understand lesbian/feminism in the deepest, most radical sense: as that love for ourselves and other women, that commitment to the freedom of all of us, which transcends the category of "sexual preference" and the issue of civil rights, 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.”

WorldCultureIssuesRightsFeminismIntegrityCommitmentAskingChosenCivil RightsRadicalCategoriesHonoredPreference
Author:Adrienne Rich
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“I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which 'sexism' is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed 'patrivincialism' or patrochialism': the assumption that women are a subgroup, that men's culture is the 'real' world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the 'great' or 'liberalizing' periods of history have been the same for women as for men.”

MenWorldHas BeensRealMightCultureTermPeriodsIntellectualFemaleDifficultyFundamentalsMalesAssumptionSexismReal WorldScholarPatriarchyDefects
Author:Adrienne Rich
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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.”

IfsThinkingWorldNeedsHumansChildrenBodyUniverseCommunityExistenceVisionImagineGeniusBalanceIndependenceSexualityMotherhoodIntimacyTransformedNew LifeHuman ExistenceConsoleOnly ChildIfs AndNew Relationship
Book:Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution
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“When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors. It takes some strength of soul--and not just individual strength, but collective understanding--to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.”

IfsKnowsWorldSoulMomentsGamesIndividualUnderstandingSawsTeacherHeardFeminismLike YouAuthorityMirrorsCollectivesVoidPsychicsThrustIndividual StrengthDisequilibrium
Author:Adrienne Rich
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