Adrienne Rich Quotes, Eye Quotes, Self 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 woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.

5 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Eye Quotes , Self Quotes

The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.

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

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To do something very common, in my own way.

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... 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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Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.

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If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.

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It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.

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

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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

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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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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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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The moment of change is the only poem.

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

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In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.

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How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

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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 impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Real Quotes , Tunnels Quotes