Adrienne Rich Quotes, Girl Quotes, Men Quotes

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.

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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Real Quotes , Nuclear Quotes

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

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Children Quotes , Newborn Child Quotes

Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother's; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Daughter Quotes , Mother Quotes

Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Culture Quotes , Becoming Quotes

I define "politics" as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Struggle 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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Sex Quotes

As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mother Quotes , Heart 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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motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

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Only where there is language is there world.

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... people are growing up in the slack flicker of a pale light which lacks the concentrated burn of a candle flame or oil wick or the bulb of a gooseneck desk lamp: a pale, wavering, oblong shimmer, emitting incessant noise, which is to real knowledge or discourse what the manic or weepy protestations of a drunk are to responsible speech. Drunks do have a way of holding an audience, though, and so does the shimmery ill-focused oblong screen.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Growing Up Quotes , Real Quotes

We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Lying Quotes , Men Quotes