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Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

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
Drenched
Assumptions
Assumption
Cannot

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
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Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
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A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
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The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
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When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.
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Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
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The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
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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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Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
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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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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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Abortion is violence a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
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...you look at me like an emergency
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Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.
Adrienne Rich
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What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
Adrienne Rich
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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
Adrienne Rich
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Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?
Adrienne Rich
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I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.
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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