Adrienne Rich Quotes, Writing Quotes, Voice Quotes

Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

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Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.

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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.

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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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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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Years Quotes , Imagination Quotes

As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.

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TV has created a kind of false collectivity.

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In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world, if poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.

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Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.

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I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Believe Quotes

To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.

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When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.

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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.

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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

No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Dream Quotes , Sleep Quotes

What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Dysfunction 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

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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Struggle Quotes , Imagination Quotes

I feel more helpless with you than without you.

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It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.

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