Adrienne Rich Quotes, Dream Quotes

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

5 years ago

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Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Political Quotes , Challenges Quotes

It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Time 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 long to create something that can't be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Knowledge Quotes , Writing Quotes

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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Real Quotes , Tunnels Quotes

I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.

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That's why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Responsibility Quotes , Warrior Quotes

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

5 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Warrior Quotes

There's been real hostility toward political poetry in the U.S., hostility or, at best, incomprehension. I'm speaking of those who have institutional power over what gets published, over grants andprizes and reviewing. Most of them, though not all, arewhite and male. But even as American society is unravelling, becoming more violent and punitive, wonderful political poetshave been emerging.

5 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Real Quotes , Political Quotes

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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In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment - not just in poetry - into the personal. A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women's movement, for instance, becoming "support-groups" or therapy groups.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Support Quotes

To become a token woman - whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters - is to become something less than a man... since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Winning Quotes , Men Quotes