Adrienne Rich Quotes, Stories Quotes, Wit Quotes

If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?

5 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Stories Quotes , Wit Quotes

"Global culture" is of course not a culture: it's the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.

5 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Marketing Quotes , Culture 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.

5 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Dysfunction Quotes

When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.

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It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Heart Quotes , Simple Quotes

... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars to escape writing of the worst thing of all-- not the crimes of other, not even our own death, but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Freedom Quotes , War Quotes

The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Sexuality Quotes , Limbs Quotes

In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Order Quotes , Unity Quotes

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Passion Quotes , Animal Quotes

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.

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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.

5 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Book Quotes , Writing 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.

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

One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Wall Quotes

The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Believe Quotes , Poetry 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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Winning Quotes , Men Quotes

I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.

5 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Gay Quotes , Talking Quotes

How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying. To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.

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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.

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I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Sex Quotes , Jewels 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