Adrienne Rich Quotes, Art Quotes, Dysfunction 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

TV has created a kind of false collectivity.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Television Quotes , Tvs Quotes

We have lived with violence far too long.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Long Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Voice Quotes , Together 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

The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Sexuality Quotes , Limbs Quotes

Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Women Quotes , Grief Quotes

One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women's choices concerning childbirth.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Religious Quotes , Law Quotes

Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mother Quotes , Son 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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Two Quotes , Giving Quotes

I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mean Quotes , Thinking Quotes

The ocean, whose tides respond, like women's menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins, the ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves... it is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Ocean Quotes , Moon Quotes

We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Running Quotes , Thinking Quotes