Adrienne Rich Quotes, Country Quotes, Art Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Country Quotes , Art Quotes

A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Life Quotes

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

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Feelings Quotes , Desire Quotes

I define "politics" as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Struggle Quotes

A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Cutting Quotes , Flesh Quotes

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Strong Women Quotes , Hard Work 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

Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Culture Quotes , Becoming Quotes

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

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , New Day Quotes , Historical 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?

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Psychics Quotes , Stories 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 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

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Giving Quotes , Delight Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Teacher Quotes , Mirrors Quotes

Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative - that we're just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different - that this is human destiny, this is human nature.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Destiny Quotes , Ideas Quotes

In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it's the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Voice Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Daughter Quotes , Mother Quotes

When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors. It takes some strength of soul--and not just individual strength, but collective understanding--to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Teacher Quotes , Mirrors 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 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Twilight Quotes , Long Quotes