Adrienne Rich Quotes, Keys Quotes, Doors Quotes

The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.

6 years ago

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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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mother Quotes , Children Quotes

In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment - not just in poetry - into the personal. A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women's movement, for instance, becoming "support-groups" or therapy groups.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Support Quotes

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Life Quotes , Respect Quotes

Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins, "What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?" Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?

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TV has created a kind of false collectivity.

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Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

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I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class. What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Country Quotes , Believe 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

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

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Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work, waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.

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Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Fall Quotes , Mean Quotes

Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.

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A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.

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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.

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Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.

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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!

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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

Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , People Quotes , Magic Quotes

...you look at me like an emergency

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