Adrienne Rich Quotes, Real Quotes, Political Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Real Quotes , Political Quotes

No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Dream Quotes , Sleep Quotes

In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Cutting Quotes , Light Quotes

It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Daughter Quotes , Father Quotes

In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , America Quotes , United States Quotes

When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Teacher Quotes , Mirrors Quotes

I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Knowing Quotes , Tomorrow Quotes

A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Country Quotes , Soul Quotes

A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Book Quotes , Editors Quotes

In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Silence Quotes , World Quotes

Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Threat Quotes

In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Order Quotes , Unity Quotes

The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits. The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Important Quotes , Culture 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Lying Quotes , Thinking Quotes

If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Imagination Quotes , Challenges Quotes

In the middle-class United States, a veneer of "alternative lifestyles" disguises the reality that, here as everywhere, women's apparent "choices" whether or not to have children are still dependent on the far from neutral will of male legislators, jurists, a male medical and pharmaceutical profession, well-financed lobbies, including the prelates of the Catholic Church, and the political reality that women do not as yet have self-determination over our bodies and still live mostly in ignorance of our authentic physicality, our possible choices, our eroticism itself.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Determination Quotes , Children Quotes

What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Dysfunction Quotes

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 repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mean Quotes , Aquariums Quotes

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Two Quotes , Giving Quotes