Adrienne Rich · 358 pages
Rating: (2.8K votes)
“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.”
― Adrienne Rich, quote from The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984
“I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.”
― Adrienne Rich, quote from The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984
“A language is a map of our failures”
― Adrienne Rich, quote from The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984
“We lie under the sheet
after making love, speaking
of loneliness
relieved in a book
relived in a book
so on that page
the clot and fissure
of it appears
words of a man
in pain
a naked word
entering the clot
a hand grasping
through bars:
deliverance
What happens between us
has happened for centuries
we know it from literature
still it happens
sexual jealousy
outflung hand
beating bed
dryness of mouth
after panting
there are books that describe all this
and they are useless”
― Adrienne Rich, quote from The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984
“A dream of tenderness
wrestles with all I know of history”
― Adrienne Rich, quote from The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984
“Otherwise you fall into contempt of your neighbor, if you judge his evil will towards you, instead of My will acting in him.”
― Catherine of Siena, quote from The Dialogue of Saint Catherine of Siena
“I’ve been slowly falling for you for a long time, and I’m afraid I fell the rest of the way in love with you last night, and you’re so much more than my darling. You’re my treasure.”
― Kristen Proby, quote from Forever with Me
“We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life—they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from Shadow and Claw
“A man who preferred to dress like a permanent tourist was just what a guide passionately looked for all his life. You may want to ask why I became a guide or when. I was a guide for the same reason as someone else is a signaler, porter, or guard. It is fated thus. Don’t laugh at my railway associations. The railways got into my blood very early in life. Engines with their tremendous clanging”
― R.K. Narayan, quote from The Guide
“Later, she didn’t remember how she escaped from his grasp, or how she ended up back in her barracks, but at that moment she realized that something had started that night that changed everything.”
― Damian Wampler, quote from Sevara: Dawn of Hope
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