Adrienne Rich Quotes, Ideas Quotes, Generations Quotes

I don't want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won't deal with it. If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Ideas Quotes , Generations Quotes

My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.

6 years ago

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Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.

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You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Reading Quotes

I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Children Quotes , Newborn Child Quotes

Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Reality Quotes , Mad Quotes

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Truth Quotes , Integrity Quotes

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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Grief Quotes , Heart Quotes

You have to be free to play around with the notion that 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Hate Quotes , Writing Quotes

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Artist Quotes , Self Quotes

... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

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Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.

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Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.

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When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders ... then I began to wonder

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Dream Quotes , Escaping Quotes

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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The password is a flicker of an eyelash.

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It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Heart Quotes , Simple Quotes

We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Lying Quotes , Men Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mother Quotes , Children Quotes

Behind all art is an element of desire...Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art — even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Grief Quotes