Adrienne Rich Quotes, Notebook Quotes, Prayer Quotes

When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand--a center of gravity.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Notebook Quotes , Prayer Quotes

It iscrucial that we understand lesbian/feminism in the deepest, most radical sense: as that love for ourselves and other women, that commitment to the freedom of all of us, which transcends the category of "sexual preference" and the issue of civil rights, to become a politics of asking women's questions, demanding a world in which the integrity of all women--not a chosen few--shall be honored and validated in every respect of culture.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Integrity Quotes , Commitment Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Daughter Quotes , Mother 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.

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

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What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Hope Quotes , Mean Quotes

One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.

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A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Country Quotes , War 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

Women's art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.

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Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

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I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Believe Quotes