Adrienne Rich Quotes, Faces Quotes, Authority Quotes

I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

6 years ago

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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.

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If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Imagination Quotes , Challenges 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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Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.

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A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Cutting Quotes , Flesh Quotes

Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!

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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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I long to create something that can't be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Knowledge Quotes , Writing Quotes

Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.

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The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Real Quotes , Choices Quotes

In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world, if poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , War Quotes , Book 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?

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Creativity Quotes , Darkness Quotes

You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Hate Quotes , Writing Quotes

We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Running Quotes , Thinking Quotes

Behind all art is an element of desire...Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art — even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?

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

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A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.

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... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Spiritual Quotes , Aquifers Quotes

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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Life Quotes , Respect Quotes