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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
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
If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
Adrienne Rich
Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
Adrienne Rich
I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
Adrienne Rich
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
I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel.
Adrienne Rich
Only where there is language is there world.
Adrienne Rich
Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
Adrienne Rich
[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
Adrienne Rich
Re-vision -- the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
Adrienne Rich
Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.
Adrienne Rich
To do something very common, in my own way.
Adrienne Rich
The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
Adrienne Rich
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
I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
Adrienne Rich
The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
Adrienne Rich
Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
Adrienne Rich
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.
Adrienne Rich
No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
Adrienne Rich
Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.
Adrienne Rich
