Adrienne Rich Quotes, Order Quotes, Unity 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Order Quotes , Unity Quotes

A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'”

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Artist Quotes , People Quotes

Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Children Quotes , Motherhood Quotes

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Writing Quotes

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Kind Quotes , Beast 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

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Feelings Quotes , Desire Quotes

We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Success Quotes , Dream Quotes

They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide...?

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Death Quotes , Suicide 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

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

Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Self Quotes , Numbness Quotes

I am suspicious - first of all, in myself - of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people's tendency to ... vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other 'exotic' ways of understanding.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , White Quotes , People Quotes

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Motivational Quotes

...you look at me like an emergency

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Looks Quotes , Emergencies Quotes

Marriage is lonelier than solitude.

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Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , People Quotes , Magic 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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Teacher Quotes , Mirrors 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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Work Quotes