Adrienne Rich Quotes, Children Quotes, Father Quotes

I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Children Quotes , Father Quotes

I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Writing 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

As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Dogma Quotes , Poet 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Gay Quotes , Talking Quotes

Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.

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All new learning looks at first like chaos.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Looks Quotes , Firsts Quotes

I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Children Quotes , Believe Quotes

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Two Quotes , Giving Quotes

It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mothers Day Quotes , Children Quotes

I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

6 years ago

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We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege

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There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Warrior Quotes

Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Women Quotes , Grief 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

Any woman's death diminishes me.

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It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Long Quotes , Optimism Quotes

A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Country Quotes , Soul Quotes

I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines. Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem - just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Bridges 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Writing Quotes , White Quotes