Adrienne Rich Quotes, Suicide Quotes, Heart Quotes

in the nineteenth year and the eleventh month speak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides: Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel on ones we knew and loved Praise to life though its windows blew shut on the breathing-room of ones we knew and loved Praise to life though ones we knew and loved loved it badly, too well, and not enough Praise to life though it tightened like a knot on the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us Praise to life giving room and reason to ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable. Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Suicide Quotes , Heart Quotes

The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn't there a difficulty of saying 'we'? You cannot speak for me. I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say 'I'; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Two Quotes , Phrases 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Spiritual Quotes , Aquifers Quotes

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

6 years ago

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Strangers are an endangered species.

6 years ago

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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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Writing Quotes

"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

You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Reading 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Eye Quotes , Survival Quotes

I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Giving Quotes , Delight Quotes

But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Struggle Quotes , Imagination 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Change Quotes , Light Quotes

We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.

6 years ago

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

6 years ago

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I feel more helpless with you than without you.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Without You Quotes , Feels Quotes

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Life Quotes , Respect Quotes

The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.

6 years ago

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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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Peace Quotes , Ubuntu 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.

6 years ago

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

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Kind Quotes , Beast Quotes