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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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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
Ultimate
Poetry
Relationship
Universe
Language
Power
Everything
Concentration

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying. To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.
Adrienne Rich
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The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual - all of that fermenting together. It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.
Adrienne Rich
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Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.
Adrienne Rich
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If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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TV has created a kind of false collectivity.
Adrienne Rich
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Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins, What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories? Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?
Adrienne Rich
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It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
Adrienne Rich
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Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
Adrienne Rich
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We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
Adrienne Rich
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Abortion is violence a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
Adrienne Rich
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Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
Adrienne Rich
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Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.
Adrienne Rich
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Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
Adrienne Rich
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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
Adrienne Rich
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
Adrienne Rich
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A language is a map of our failures
Adrienne Rich
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Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother's and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
Adrienne Rich
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The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.
Adrienne Rich
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Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
Adrienne Rich