Adrienne Rich Quotes, Destiny Quotes, Ideas Quotes

Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative - that we're just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different - that this is human destiny, this is human nature.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Destiny Quotes , Ideas Quotes

Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Running Quotes , Children Quotes

A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'”

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

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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

It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Moving Quotes , May 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

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

The moment of change is the only poem.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Change Quotes , Healing Quotes

When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Teacher Quotes , Mirrors 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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Self Quotes , Numbness Quotes

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

Only where there is language is there world.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , World Quotes

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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Book Quotes , Editors Quotes

We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too "political," "merely" oral and thus unreliable.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Writing Quotes , White Quotes

In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it's the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Voice Quotes

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

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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Dream Quotes , Struggle Quotes

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Writing Quotes

There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Truth Is Quotes , Complexity Quotes