Adrienne Rich Quotes, Damage Quotes, Purpose Quotes

The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.

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The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.

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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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Life Quotes , Memories Quotes

A language is a map of our failures

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To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Dream Quotes , Memories Quotes

I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Giving Quotes , Delight Quotes

Marriage is lonelier than solitude.

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We have lived with violence far too long.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Long Quotes

To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Reading Quotes , Mean Quotes

The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from "Transcendental Etude

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Poverty Quotes , Transcendental Quotes

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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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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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

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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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Time Quotes

Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.

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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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A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Desire Quotes , Might Quotes

The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.

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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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There's been real hostility toward political poetry in the U.S., hostility or, at best, incomprehension. I'm speaking of those who have institutional power over what gets published, over grants andprizes and reviewing. Most of them, though not all, arewhite and male. But even as American society is unravelling, becoming more violent and punitive, wonderful political poetshave been emerging.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Real Quotes , Political Quotes