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  • Adrienne Rich Quotes   253
  • The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Dream Quotes , Struggle Quotes
  • 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



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Book Quotes , Writing 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Order Quotes , Unity 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?
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Freedom Quotes , War Quotes
  • Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Daughter Quotes , Mother Quotes
  • We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Lying Quotes , Men Quotes
  • In the middle-class United States, a veneer of "alternative lifestyles" disguises the reality that, here as everywhere, women's apparent "choices" whether or not to have children are still dependent on the far from neutral will of male legislators, jurists, a male medical and pharmaceutical profession, well-financed lobbies, including the prelates of the Catholic Church, and the political reality that women do not as yet have self-determination over our bodies and still live mostly in ignorance of our authentic physicality, our possible choices, our eroticism itself.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Determination Quotes , Children Quotes
  • I've known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us, whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Creativity Quotes , Darkness Quotes
  • Women's art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Work Quotes