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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.

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
Country
Absolutes
Feel
Absolute
Feels
Measure
Good
Failure
People
Imagination
War
Helping
Represented
Political
Scientific

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.
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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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Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work, waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.
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Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
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Reality, the oppressor's tongue.
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TV has created a kind of false collectivity.
Adrienne Rich
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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
Adrienne Rich
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The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?
Adrienne Rich
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There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
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The women's movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked. I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.
Adrienne Rich
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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
Adrienne Rich
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The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
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.
Adrienne Rich
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Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.
Adrienne Rich
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The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from Transcendental Etude
Adrienne Rich
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I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.
Adrienne Rich
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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
Adrienne Rich
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There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.
Adrienne Rich
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I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.
Adrienne Rich
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Life on the planet is born of woman.
Adrienne Rich