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.

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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I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Children Quotes , Newborn Child Quotes

Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins, "What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?" Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Psychics Quotes , Stories 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

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

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"Global culture" is of course not a culture: it's the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Marketing Quotes , Culture Quotes

The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.

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The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

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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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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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To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.

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motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

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To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?

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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

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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Believe Quotes , Poetry Quotes

Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Life Quotes , Poetry Quotes

Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Children Quotes , Motherhood Quotes

Re-vision -- the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Eye Quotes , Survival Quotes

Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Political Quotes , Challenges Quotes