Adrienne Rich Quotes, Long Quotes

We have lived with violence far too long.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Long 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Knives Quotes , Cake Quotes

The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual - all of that fermenting together. It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , People Quotes , Political Quotes

Over many years so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me - it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Years Quotes , Imagination 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?

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Real Quotes , Tunnels Quotes

... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Passion Quotes , Poetry Quotes

The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Memories Quotes , Lying Quotes

You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Reading Quotes

A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Country Quotes , Soul Quotes

Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Feelings Quotes , Desire Quotes

... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Spiritual Quotes , Aquifers Quotes

I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Knowing Quotes , Tomorrow Quotes

Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Reality Quotes , Mad Quotes