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We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.

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
Thinking
Process
Possess
Running
Revolutionary
Feelings
Romance
Formless
Stills
Remains
Transformative
Still
Resources
Resource
May
Vision
Inadequate
Might
Feeling
Cycles
Every
Language
Technological

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
Adrienne Rich
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In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.
Adrienne Rich
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Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.
Adrienne Rich
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False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day ... the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.
Adrienne Rich
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The moment of change is the only poem.
Adrienne Rich
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I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.
Adrienne Rich
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My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
Adrienne Rich
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We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
Adrienne Rich
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Global culture is of course not a culture: it's the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.
Adrienne Rich
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The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from Splittings
Adrienne Rich
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... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars to escape writing of the worst thing of all-- not the crimes of other, not even our own death, but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?
Adrienne Rich
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We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
Adrienne Rich
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... this world gives no room to be what we dreamt of being
Adrienne Rich
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A language is a map of our failures
Adrienne Rich
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Re-vision -- the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
Adrienne Rich
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I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
Adrienne Rich
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In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite) we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.
Adrienne Rich
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If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
Adrienne Rich