Adrienne Rich Quotes, Daughter Quotes, Mother Quotes

Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Daughter Quotes , Mother Quotes

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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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.

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Strangers are an endangered species.

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Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness

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Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Eye Quotes , Self Quotes

I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Thinking 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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Dream Quotes , Struggle 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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Writing Quotes , White Quotes

Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.

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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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I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.

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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.

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The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

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The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?

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It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness

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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

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

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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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Two Quotes , Giving Quotes