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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

Adrienne Rich

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Adrienne Rich
Age: 82 †
Born: 1929
Born: May 16
Died: 2012
Died: March 27
Essayist
Feminist
Peace Activist
Poet
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Adrienne Cecile Rich
Adrienne Cécile Rich
Adrienne Riche
Events
Memories
Past
Women
Delusions
Real
Delusion
Every
False
Complicated
Journey

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Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
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Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
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... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.
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Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
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Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.
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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
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The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
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Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.
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It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.
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A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.
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Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
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One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women's choices concerning childbirth.
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The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
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The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To see the light too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
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Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others. It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.
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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.
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I define politics as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.
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To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.
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Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?
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