Adrienne Rich Quotes, Religious Quotes, Law Quotes

One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women's choices concerning childbirth.

6 years ago

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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.

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The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Twilight Quotes , Long 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.

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You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

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Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother ... when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mother Quotes , Realization Quotes

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Inspiring Quotes , War Quotes

What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.

6 years ago

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Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

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The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.

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I've known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us, whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Creativity Quotes , Darkness Quotes

The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.

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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