Adrienne Rich Quotes, Sex Quotes, Race Quotes

Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.

6 years ago

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One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.

6 years ago

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There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Truth Is Quotes , Complexity Quotes

Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Heterosexuality Is Quotes , Cost Quotes

Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.

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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Success Quotes , Dream Quotes

Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single "I" or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Voice 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

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Writing 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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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.

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The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Change Quotes , Light Quotes

The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn't there a difficulty of saying 'we'? You cannot speak for me. I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say 'I'; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Two Quotes , Phrases Quotes