Adrienne Rich Quotes, Reality Quotes, Mad Quotes

Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Reality Quotes , Mad 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?

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Freedom Quotes , War 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.

6 years ago

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

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Kind Quotes , Beast Quotes

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Creating Quotes , Telling The Truth Quotes

The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Two Quotes

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

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False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , New Day Quotes , Historical 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Running Quotes , Thinking Quotes

The password is a flicker of an eyelash.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Eyelashes Quotes , Passwords Quotes

As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Order Quotes

These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Bears Quotes , Scar 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

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Imagination Quotes , Challenges Quotes

Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Writing Quotes , Voice 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Lying Quotes , Thinking Quotes

No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Dream Quotes , Sleep Quotes

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Cheating Quotes , Art Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Dream Quotes , Struggle Quotes

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day ... the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , History Quotes , Clay Quotes