Adrienne Rich Quotes - Page 10

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• Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we're not young.

  Adrienne Rich

  Time, Years, Missing

  1978 The Dream of a Common Language,'Twenty-One Love Poems, III'.

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• 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.

  Adrienne Rich

  Wall, War, Grief

  Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.91, W. W. Norton & Company

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• What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

  Adrienne Rich

  Kind, Beast, Turns

  Adrienne Rich (2013). “The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977”, p.27, W. W. Norton & Company

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• If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.

  Adrienne Rich

  Loser, Responsible, Ends

  Adrienne Rich (2013). “The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977”, p.31, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I am suspicious - first of all, in myself - of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people's tendency to ... vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other 'exotic' ways of understanding.

  Adrienne Rich

  White, People, Understanding

  Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.16, W. W. Norton & Company

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• To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?

  Adrienne Rich

  Reading, Mean, Multiple Choice

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• War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.

  Adrienne Rich

  War, Imagination, Political

  Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.22, W. W. Norton & Company

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• 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.

  Adrienne Rich

  Art, Work, Creative

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• The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

  Adrienne Rich

  Song, Art, Struggle

  Adrienne Rich (1994). “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985”, p.117, W. W. Norton & Company

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• In the middle-class United States, a veneer of "alternative lifestyles" disguises the reality that, here as everywhere, women's apparent "choices" whether or not to have children are still dependent on the far from neutral will of male legislators, jurists, a male medical and pharmaceutical profession, well-financed lobbies, including the prelates of the Catholic Church, and the political reality that women do not as yet have self-determination over our bodies and still live mostly in ignorance of our authentic physicality, our possible choices, our eroticism itself.

  Adrienne Rich

  Determination, Children, Ignorance

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• Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!

  Adrienne Rich

  Women, Grief, Tears

  Adrienne Rich (1967). “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems, 1954-1962”, p.58, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.

  Adrienne Rich

  War, Imagination, Confusion

  Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.23, W. W. Norton & Company

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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.

  Adrienne Rich

  Lying, Thinking, Intelligent

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978”, p.5, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.

  Adrienne Rich

  Keys, Doors, Tolerance

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978”, p.137, W. W. Norton & Company

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• ... people are growing up in the slack flicker of a pale light which lacks the concentrated burn of a candle flame or oil wick or the bulb of a gooseneck desk lamp: a pale, wavering, oblong shimmer, emitting incessant noise, which is to real knowledge or discourse what the manic or weepy protestations of a drunk are to responsible speech. Drunks do have a way of holding an audience, though, and so does the shimmery ill-focused oblong screen.

  Adrienne Rich

  Growing Up, Real, Flames

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• The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.

  Adrienne Rich

  Twilight, Long, Nineteen

  Adrienne Rich (1993). “Your Native Land, Your Life”, p.1, W. W. Norton & Company

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• One line typed twenty years ago
  can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
  to glorify art as detachment
  or torture of those we
  did not love but also
  did not want to kill.

  Adrienne Rich

  Art, Wall, Years

  Adrienne Rich (1993). “Your Native Land, Your Life”, p.27, W. W. Norton & Company

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• 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.

  Adrienne Rich

  Running, Children, Past

  Adrienne Rich (1993). “Your Native Land, Your Life”, p.44, W. W. Norton & Company

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

  Adrienne Rich

  Language, Enough

  Adrienne Rich (2012). “Later Poems: Selected and New: 1971-2012: 1971–2012”, p.27, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.

  Adrienne Rich

  Children, Father, Choices

  Adrienne Rich (1994). “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985”, p.80, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.

  Adrienne Rich

  Loneliness, Liars, Lying

  Adrienne Rich (2002). “Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations”, p.23, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which 'sexism' is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed 'patrivincialism' or patrochialism': the assumption that women are a subgroup, that men's culture is the 'real' world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the 'great' or 'liberalizing' periods of history have been the same for women as for men.

  Adrienne Rich

  Real, Men, Intellectual

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

  Adrienne Rich

  Use, Don't Trust

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• What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.

  Adrienne Rich

  Art, Dysfunction, Adequate

  Source: criticalflame.org

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• Over many years so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me - it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry.

  Adrienne Rich

  Years, Imagination, Path

  Source: criticalflame.org

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