Adrienne Rich Quotes, Thinking Quotes, Health Education Quotes

I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.

6 years ago

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In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment - not just in poetry - into the personal. A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women's movement, for instance, becoming "support-groups" or therapy groups.

6 years ago

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I came to explore the wreck.

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Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.

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I am suspicious - first of all, in myself - of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people's tendency to ... vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other 'exotic' ways of understanding.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , White Quotes , People Quotes

Women's art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Work 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 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

My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.

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Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother's; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Daughter Quotes , Mother Quotes

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

The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual - all of that fermenting together. It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.

6 years ago

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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

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.

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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Success Quotes , Dream Quotes

There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Men Quotes , Body Quotes

The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.

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You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

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