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Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich Quotes

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Famous Adrienne Rich Quotes

“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.”

ThinkingWorldTryingLyingCultureEasyAnswersFeminismMovementIntelligentIntentionDenyPassiveFullnessDegrade
Book:On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978
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“I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines. Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem - just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc.”

ThinkingWayLongSoundLinesSpaceReaderBreathsMusicalDrivingSymbolsHillsBridgesEtcTrafficPausesUrgencyIndicationSteepIcyIntersectionsLong Lines
Author:Adrienne Rich
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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.”

ThinkingNeedsHas BeensStatesValuesSocialTermConsciousnessSupportGroupsMovementHugeBecomingSolutionsInstanceTherapyCollectivesSixtySeventiesWithdrawalSupport Groups
Author:Adrienne Rich
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“That's why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.”

IfsThinkingWantGivingShouldTryingPersonsStillsEndsLawSufferingSpeakResponsibilityIdentityStrangeShould HaveDown AndAngryWarriorTaking Responsibility
Book:Your Native Land, Your Life
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“Saw you walking barefoot taking a long look at the new moon's eyelid later spread sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair asleep but not oblivious of the unslept unsleeping elsewhere Tonight I think no poetry will serve Syntax of rendition: verb pilots the plane adverb modifies action verb force-feeds noun submerges the subject noun is choking verb disgraced goes on doing now diagram the sentence”

ThinkingLooksLongActionForceDarkSleepSawsSubjectsHairGoes OnWalkingMoonSpreadSentencesNakedPlanesFallenTonightPilotsElsewhereChokeVerbsNounsObliviousBarefootEyelidsNew MoonSyntaxDiagramsAdverbsDark HairWalking Barefoot
Book:Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010: Poems 2007–2010
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“But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?…we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.”

ThinkingMenChildrenMadeSelfMotherChoicesNamesRoomsWifeImagineReadyRelationChosenFamiliarYour Freedom
Author:Adrienne Rich
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“Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.”

ThinkingMenLittlesYoungGirlBrainVisionFiguresSafeMessagesStandardsFoundationLaysMalesDependentYoung WomenNormGrammarTunnelsVariablesSexistDeviantsTunnel Vision
Book:On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978
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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.”

IfsThinkingWayHas BeensMadeSeemsPastJusticeDiversityTraditionSocial JusticeHistoricalFeministSporadic
Book:On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978
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“We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.”

IfsThinkingWorldNeedsHumansChildrenBodyUniverseCommunityExistenceVisionImagineGeniusBalanceIndependenceSexualityMotherhoodIntimacyTransformedNew LifeHuman ExistenceConsoleOnly ChildIfs AndNew Relationship
Book:Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution
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