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

More quotes by 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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These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
Adrienne Rich
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We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
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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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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You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.
Adrienne Rich
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But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.
Adrienne Rich
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I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.
Adrienne Rich
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If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
Adrienne Rich
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The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
Adrienne Rich
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Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine
Adrienne Rich
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I long to create something that can't be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.
Adrienne Rich
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The worker can unionize, go out on strike mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
Adrienne Rich
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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
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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I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel.
Adrienne Rich
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Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process it is not an identity for all time.
Adrienne Rich
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A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.
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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We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
Adrienne Rich