Adrienne Rich Quotes, Maps Quotes

A language is a map of our failures

6 years ago

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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

I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Children Quotes , Father 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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I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Faces Quotes , Authority Quotes

We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Children Quotes , New Relationship 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

The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.

6 years ago

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We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.

6 years ago

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You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Hate Quotes , Writing Quotes

[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Risk Quotes , Survival Quotes

It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Moving Quotes , May Quotes

I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Children Quotes , Newborn Child Quotes