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A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

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
Kill
Desire
Living
Theorize
Tell
Wick
Live
Reminds
Might
Burn
Even
Poem
Revolutionary

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.
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Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.
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The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits. The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
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When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders ... then I began to wonder
Adrienne Rich
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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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The belief that established science and scholarship--which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making--are objectiveand value-free and that feminist studies are unscholarly, biased, and ideological dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological there is no neutrality in
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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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There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
Adrienne Rich
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We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.
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Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.
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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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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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 necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.
Adrienne Rich
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Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
Adrienne Rich
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I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
Adrienne Rich
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There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.
Adrienne Rich
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When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.
Adrienne Rich