Adrienne Rich Quotes, Hate Quotes, Passion Quotes

White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn't brought up to hate. But hate isn't the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness - that primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.

5 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Hate Quotes , Passion Quotes

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

The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits. The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Important Quotes , Culture Quotes

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.

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Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Relationship Quotes , Language And Power Quotes

When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Teacher Quotes , Mirrors Quotes

Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.

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Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Threat Quotes

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

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Vision Quotes , Goes On Quotes

Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine

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Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Life Quotes , Poetry 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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Freedom Quotes , War 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

The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Change Quotes , Light 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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Political Quotes , Challenges Quotes

Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mother Quotes , Son Quotes

We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Life Quotes , Memories 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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Daughter Quotes , Mother Quotes

The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual - all of that fermenting together. It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , People Quotes , Political Quotes