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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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The moment of change is the only poem.
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I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.
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Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
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Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.
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The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
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A language is a map of our failures
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The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.
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Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls.
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Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
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I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
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But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.
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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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You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.
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Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process it is not an identity for all time.
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What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it.
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The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
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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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Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
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As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.
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The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
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