Adrienne Rich Quotes, Artist Quotes, Self Quotes

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

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Artist Quotes , Self Quotes

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

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Language 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Voice 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

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

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Unseen Quotes , Looks Quotes

Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Children Quotes , Motherhood Quotes

You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Reading Quotes

The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Believe Quotes , Poetry Quotes

... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Spiritual Quotes , Aquifers Quotes

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

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Healing Quotes , Space Quotes

I've known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us, whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Creativity Quotes , Darkness Quotes

Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Wall Quotes , Ivy Quotes

The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Real Quotes , Choices Quotes

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

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Life Quotes , Poetry Quotes

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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Knowledge Quotes , Writing Quotes

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Looks Quotes , Firsts Quotes

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Two Quotes , Giving Quotes

Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single "I" or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Voice Quotes

In a society where some people are far more educated than others, in which public education is ill-funded - here I am speaking of the U.S. - while we build more and more prisons to incarcerate youth who ought to be in school, there is already a gap between those with education and those without. Those with educational privilege can be seen as arrogant, remote, alien - and very often they believe themselves superior.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Educational Quotes , Believe Quotes

I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.

6 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Writing Quotes