"I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel."
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Quote collection
Adrienne Rich quotes (page 9 of 13)
253 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two."
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"In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger."
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"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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"Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness"
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"I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give."
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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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"To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery."
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"A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'”"
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"No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should beginwith the simple exercises firstand slowly go on tryingthe hard ones, practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue."
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"Strangers are an endangered species."
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""Global culture" is of course not a culture: it's the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many."
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"In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment - not just in poetry - into the personal. A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women's movement, for instance, becoming "support-groups" or therapy groups."
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"The women's movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked. I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices."
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"I don't want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won't deal with it. If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do."
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"When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing."
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"Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be."
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"I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition."
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"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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"These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know."
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