Adrienne Rich Quotes, Freedom Quotes, War Quotes

... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars to escape writing of the worst thing of all-- not the crimes of other, not even our own death, but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?

6 years ago

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Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Real Quotes , Nuclear Quotes

The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Inspiring Quotes , Mothers Day Quotes

in the nineteenth year and the eleventh month speak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides: Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel on ones we knew and loved Praise to life though its windows blew shut on the breathing-room of ones we knew and loved Praise to life though ones we knew and loved loved it badly, too well, and not enough Praise to life though it tightened like a knot on the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us Praise to life giving room and reason to ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable. Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Suicide Quotes , Heart Quotes

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

Strangers are an endangered species.

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To do something very common, in my own way.

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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Success Quotes , Dream Quotes

I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Book Quotes , Writing Quotes

I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel.

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Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.

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Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Relationship Quotes , Language And Power Quotes

The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Real Quotes , Choices Quotes

White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn't brought up to hate. But hate isn't the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness - that primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Hate Quotes , Passion Quotes

We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too "political," "merely" oral and thus unreliable.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Writing Quotes , White Quotes

It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.

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What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Hope Quotes , Mean Quotes

"Global culture" is of course not a culture: it's the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Marketing Quotes , Culture Quotes

The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Dream Quotes , Struggle Quotes