Adrienne Rich Quotes, Wall Quotes, War 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Wall Quotes , War Quotes

We have lived with violence far too long.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Long Quotes

The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from "Transcendental Etude

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Poverty Quotes , Transcendental 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mother Quotes , Children 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Daughter Quotes , Mother Quotes

We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , People Quotes , Way 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

Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work, waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Children Quotes , Growing Up 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Believe 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

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

Behind all art is an element of desire...Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art — even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Grief Quotes

Over many years so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me - it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Years Quotes , Imagination Quotes

We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Running Quotes , Thinking Quotes

Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Liars Quotes , Lying Quotes

Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Past Quotes , Thinking 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

Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.

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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

In a society where some people are far more educated than others, in which public education is ill-funded - here I am speaking of the U.S. - while we build more and more prisons to incarcerate youth who ought to be in school, there is already a gap between those with education and those without. Those with educational privilege can be seen as arrogant, remote, alien - and very often they believe themselves superior.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Educational Quotes , Believe Quotes