Adrienne Rich Quotes, Self Quotes, Numbness 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Self Quotes , Numbness Quotes

To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.

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

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I came to explore the wreck.

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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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Experience is always larger than language.

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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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In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

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Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Knives Quotes , Cake 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.

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I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.

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When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.

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

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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

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.

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A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

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Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Fall Quotes , Recovery Quotes

The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn't there a difficulty of saying 'we'? You cannot speak for me. I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say 'I'; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Two Quotes , Phrases Quotes