Adrienne Rich Quotes, Bears Quotes, Scar Quotes

These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.

5 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Bears Quotes , Scar Quotes

I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Book Quotes , Writing 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

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

I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mind Quotes , Trying Quotes

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.

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

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There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Truth Is Quotes , Complexity Quotes

Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Self Quotes , Numbness Quotes

What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Hope Quotes , Mean Quotes

We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Life Quotes , Memories Quotes

Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins, "What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?" Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?

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A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.

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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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It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Time Quotes

To become a token woman - whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters - is to become something less than a man... since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.

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The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Motivational 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

We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Lying Quotes , Men Quotes