Adrienne Rich Quotes, Exercise Quotes, Simple Quotes

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should beginwith the simple exercises firstand slowly go on tryingthe hard ones, practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Exercise Quotes , Simple Quotes

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

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Writing Quotes

The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mother Quotes , Children Quotes

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Memories Quotes , Lying Quotes

Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother's; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Daughter Quotes , Mother Quotes

We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Running Quotes , Thinking Quotes

I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Sex Quotes , Jewels Quotes

When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Teacher Quotes , Mirrors Quotes

A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Desire Quotes , Might Quotes

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Girl Quotes , Men Quotes

Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Self Quotes , Numbness 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

When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Teacher Quotes , Mirrors Quotes