Adrienne Rich Quotes, Notebook Quotes, Prayer 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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TV has created a kind of false collectivity.

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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.

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An honorable human relationship ... is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!

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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Fake People Quotes , Memories Quotes

I don't want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won't deal with it. If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Ideas Quotes , Generations Quotes

What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it.

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... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Passion Quotes , Poetry 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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Self Quotes , Numbness 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.

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The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits. The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.

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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 assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.

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Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

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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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Experience is always larger than language.

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How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying. To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.

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In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.

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I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Health Education Quotes