Adrienne Rich Quotes, Two Quotes, Giving 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.

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

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What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Voice Quotes , Together Quotes

An honorable human relationship ... is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Violent Quotes , Process Quotes

There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet

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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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Suffering Quotes , Nerves 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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Keys Quotes , Doors Quotes

When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.

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

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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!

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These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.

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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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Dream Quotes , Memories 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

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Knives Quotes , Cake Quotes

I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.

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Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others. It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Media Quotes , People Quotes

The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Twilight Quotes , Long Quotes

I've known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us, whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?

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A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Cutting Quotes , Flesh 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