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
“The anarch knows the rules. He has studied them as a historian and goes along with them as a contemporary. Wherever possible, he plays his own game within their framework; this makes the fewest waves.”
― Ernst Jünger, quote from Eumeswil
“I wanted to be alone with the One. The One who scaled then careened from the heights of the Mount. The One who raised up the man from the mud. The One who fashioned me from a part of the man and knew me more intimately than even the adam.”
― Tosca Lee, quote from Havah: The Story of Eve
“He raked his hand through his hair. 'This is more difficult than I'd anticipated.'
Good, she thought. If he was going to break her heart, she didn't want it to be easy for him.
'What I'm trying to say is that I had it all wrong. I don't want a wife who...'
'You don't want a wife?' she choked.
'No!' he practically yelled. Then he continued in a more normal tone, 'I don't want a wife who will look the other way if I stray.'
'You want me to /watch?/
'No, I want you to be furious.'
Ellie was by now on the verge of tears. 'You deliberately want to make me angry? To hurt me?'
'No. Oh, God, you've got it all wrong...I just want you to love me so much that if I did [be unfaithful] - which I'm not going to - you would want to have me drawn and quartered.”
― Julia Quinn, quote from Brighter Than the Sun
“Audrey nodded warily. She had never cared for conspiratorial female conversation of this sort. Its assumption of shared preoccupations was usually unfounded in her experience, its intimacies almost always the trapdoor to some subterranean hostility.”
― Zoë Heller, quote from The Believers
“Beautiful doesn't begin to describe it. A flower is beautiful. But this is beautiful the way that a person is beautiful- terrifying with its jagged edges, yet seductive with its crevices that hide so many secrets.”
― Jeri Smith-Ready, quote from Requiem for the Devil
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