Adrienne Rich Quotes, Daughter Quotes, Mother 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.

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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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , War Quotes , Book Quotes

We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too "political," "merely" oral and thus unreliable.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Writing Quotes , White 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

Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Heterosexuality Is Quotes , Cost Quotes

The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Real Quotes , Choices Quotes

Experience is always larger than language.

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A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Desire Quotes , Might 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

in the nineteenth year and the eleventh month speak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides: Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel on ones we knew and loved Praise to life though its windows blew shut on the breathing-room of ones we knew and loved Praise to life though ones we knew and loved loved it badly, too well, and not enough Praise to life though it tightened like a knot on the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us Praise to life giving room and reason to ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable. Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Suicide Quotes , Heart Quotes

In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Cutting Quotes , Light 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

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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Culture Quotes , Becoming 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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When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders ... then I began to wonder

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I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from "Splittings

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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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Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother ... when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.

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You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Reading Quotes

One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women's choices concerning childbirth.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Religious Quotes , Law Quotes