Adrienne Rich Quotes, Eye Quotes, Survival Quotes

Re-vision -- the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Eye Quotes , Survival Quotes

One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.

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Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.

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Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

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The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political

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

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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.

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It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness

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The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Inspiring Quotes , Mothers Day 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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Gay Quotes , Talking Quotes

The belief that established science and scholarship--which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making--are "objective"and "value-free" and that feminist studies are "unscholarly," "biased," and "ideological" dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture!

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Feminist 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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Lying Quotes , Thinking 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?

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Lying is done with words and also with silence.

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The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mean Quotes , Aquariums 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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Children Quotes , Growing Up Quotes

The women's movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked. I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Voice Quotes , Political 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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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