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

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.
Adrienne Rich
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The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.
Adrienne Rich
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The password is a flicker of an eyelash.
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.
Adrienne Rich
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Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.
Adrienne Rich
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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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In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment - not just in poetry - into the personal. A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women's movement, for instance, becoming support-groups or therapy groups.
Adrienne Rich
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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we're not young.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political
Adrienne Rich
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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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I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.
Adrienne Rich
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What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.
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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What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.
Adrienne Rich
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If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.
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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When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.
Adrienne Rich