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  • Adrienne Rich Quotes   253
  • I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Life Quotes , Respect Quotes
  • There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Unseen Quotes , Looks 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



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Voice Quotes
  • Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Memories Quotes , Lying 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.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Winning Quotes , Men 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.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Life Quotes , Memories Quotes
  • In a society where some people are far more educated than others, in which public education is ill-funded - here I am speaking of the U.S. - while we build more and more prisons to incarcerate youth who ought to be in school, there is already a gap between those with education and those without. Those with educational privilege can be seen as arrogant, remote, alien - and very often they believe themselves superior.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Educational Quotes , Believe Quotes
  • [The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Risk Quotes , Survival Quotes