Adrienne Rich Quotes, Life Quotes, Memories Quotes

We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Life Quotes , Memories 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

The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Twilight Quotes , Long Quotes

What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Voice Quotes , Together Quotes

The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Liars Quotes , Lying Quotes

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Knives Quotes , Cake Quotes

In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Silence Quotes , World 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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Spiritual Quotes , Aquifers Quotes

Saw you walking barefoot taking a long look at the new moon's eyelid later spread sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair asleep but not oblivious of the unslept unsleeping elsewhere Tonight I think no poetry will serve Syntax of rendition: verb pilots the plane adverb modifies action verb force-feeds noun submerges the subject noun is choking verb disgraced goes on doing now diagram the sentence

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Sleep Quotes , Dark Quotes

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mean Quotes , Aquariums Quotes

Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Abortion Quotes , Violence Quotes

I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Writing Quotes

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Memories Quotes , Lying Quotes

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Kind Quotes , Beast Quotes

Only where there is language is there world.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , World Quotes

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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Violent Quotes , Process Quotes

The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Wall Quotes , War Quotes

The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Loneliness Quotes , Liars Quotes

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Relationship Quotes , Language And Power Quotes

... people are growing up in the slack flicker of a pale light which lacks the concentrated burn of a candle flame or oil wick or the bulb of a gooseneck desk lamp: a pale, wavering, oblong shimmer, emitting incessant noise, which is to real knowledge or discourse what the manic or weepy protestations of a drunk are to responsible speech. Drunks do have a way of holding an audience, though, and so does the shimmery ill-focused oblong screen.

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