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and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.

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
Living
Visions
Claim
Claims
Touch
Vision
Asks

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.
Adrienne Rich
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We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
Adrienne Rich
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... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.
Adrienne Rich
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It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple
Adrienne Rich
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I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.
Adrienne Rich
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The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
Adrienne Rich
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But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?…we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.
Adrienne Rich
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I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
Adrienne Rich
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The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.
Adrienne Rich
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There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
Adrienne Rich
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How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
Adrienne Rich
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I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.
Adrienne Rich
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False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.
Adrienne Rich
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motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
Adrienne Rich
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Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.
Adrienne Rich
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In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.
Adrienne Rich
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Reality, the oppressor's tongue.
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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... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars to escape writing of the worst thing of all-- not the crimes of other, not even our own death, but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?
Adrienne Rich
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It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.
Adrienne Rich