Adrienne Rich Quotes, Daughter Quotes, Mother Quotes

Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.

5 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Daughter Quotes , Mother Quotes

But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?…we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.

5 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mother Quotes , Children Quotes

A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Desire Quotes , Might Quotes

The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

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Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others. It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Media Quotes , People 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

The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.

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A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

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There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice...In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Country Quotes , Art Quotes

A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.

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Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single "I" or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Voice Quotes

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Warrior 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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Country Quotes , War Quotes

The women's movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked. I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Voice Quotes , Political Quotes

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Heart Quotes , Age 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.

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

The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Memories Quotes , Lying 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

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

You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Hate Quotes , Writing Quotes