Adrienne Rich Quotes, Poverty Quotes, Transcendental Quotes

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

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Poverty Quotes , Transcendental 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.

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

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

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

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

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How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Daughter Quotes , Mother Quotes

Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work, waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Children Quotes , Growing Up Quotes

As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Dogma Quotes , Poet Quotes

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Greed Quotes , May Quotes

I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Thinking Quotes , World Quotes

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Heart Quotes , Age Quotes

A language is a map of our failures

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Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Running Quotes , Children Quotes

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

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Truth Quotes , Integrity 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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Notebook Quotes , Prayer Quotes

... this world gives no room to be what we dreamt of being

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Giving Quotes , World Quotes

To become a token woman - whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters - is to become something less than a man... since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Winning Quotes , Men Quotes

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Passion Quotes , Animal 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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Religious Quotes , Law Quotes