Adrienne Rich Quotes, Life Quotes

A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Life Quotes

It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Daughter Quotes , Father Quotes

A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Book Quotes , Editors 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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Religious Quotes , Law Quotes

Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness

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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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Faces Quotes , Authority Quotes

If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Thinking Quotes , One Direction Quotes

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

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The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from "Transcendental Etude

6 years ago

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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Artist Quotes , Self Quotes

When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors. It takes some strength of soul--and not just individual strength, but collective understanding--to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Teacher Quotes , Mirrors Quotes

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Dream Quotes , Memories Quotes

We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too "political," "merely" oral and thus unreliable.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Writing Quotes , White Quotes