Adrienne Rich Quotes, Winning Quotes, Men 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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Winning Quotes , Men Quotes

[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Risk Quotes , Survival Quotes

We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Children Quotes , New Relationship Quotes

To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Dream Quotes , Effort Quotes

The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Believe Quotes , Poetry Quotes

We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Love Quotes

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Strong Women Quotes , Hard Work Quotes

But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mother Quotes , Mind Quotes

The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Inspiring Quotes , Mothers Day Quotes

Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Real Quotes , Nuclear Quotes

In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Cutting Quotes , Light Quotes

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Country Quotes , War Quotes

... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Spiritual Quotes , Aquifers Quotes

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Believe Quotes

The moment of change is the only poem.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Change Quotes , Healing Quotes

If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Peace Quotes , Ubuntu Quotes

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Looks Quotes , Firsts 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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Inspiring Quotes , War Quotes

In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Powerful Quotes , Lying Quotes

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Vision Quotes , Goes On Quotes