Adrienne Rich Quotes, Spiritual Quotes, Aquifers 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

The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Political Quotes , Feelings Quotes

Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , People Quotes , Magic Quotes

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Grief Quotes , Heart 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

As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mother Quotes , Heart Quotes

Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Fall Quotes , Recovery Quotes

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Writing Quotes

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

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Dogma Quotes , Poet Quotes

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

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Truth Quotes , Want Something Quotes

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day ... the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , History Quotes , Clay Quotes

Only where there is language is there world.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , World Quotes

It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Moving Quotes , May Quotes

I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mean Quotes , Thinking Quotes

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , New Day Quotes , Historical 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

For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mean Quotes , Way Quotes

I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Children Quotes , Father 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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Reading 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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Giving Quotes , Delight Quotes