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If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.
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
Hope
Empowering
Live
Transformation
Trying
Dignity
People
Ground
Build
Begin
Brutalized
Society
Powerless
Peace
Transform
More quotes by Adrienne Rich
The password is a flicker of an eyelash.
Adrienne Rich
... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.
Adrienne Rich
Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
Adrienne Rich
The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political
Adrienne Rich
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
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
My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
Adrienne Rich
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
Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
Adrienne Rich
It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
Adrienne Rich
We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
Adrienne Rich
In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it's the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.
Adrienne Rich
I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives.
Adrienne Rich
Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
Adrienne Rich
The moment of change is the only poem.
Adrienne Rich
Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
Adrienne Rich
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
It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
Adrienne Rich
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
We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.
Adrienne Rich