Adrienne Rich Quotes, Life Quotes, Respect Quotes

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Life Quotes , Respect Quotes

The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from "Transcendental Etude

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Poverty Quotes , Transcendental Quotes

There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Unseen Quotes , Looks Quotes

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

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Language Quotes

Behind all art is an element of desire...Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art — even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?

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I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.

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Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Past Quotes , Thinking Quotes

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day ... the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , History Quotes , Clay 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

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

The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mother Quotes , Children Quotes

Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Sex Quotes , Race Quotes

Women's art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.

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I came to explore the wreck.

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motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

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I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Knowing Quotes , Tomorrow Quotes

Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother ... when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mother Quotes , Realization Quotes

Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Sleep Quotes , Midnight 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

Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Liars Quotes , Lying Quotes