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When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.

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
Mean
Trip
Taking
Forever
Talk

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
Adrienne Rich
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Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.
Adrienne Rich
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False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day ... the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.
Adrienne Rich
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I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
Adrienne Rich
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To become a token woman - whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters - is to become something less than a man... since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.
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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The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.
Adrienne Rich
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Abortion is violence a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
Adrienne Rich
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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
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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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It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
Adrienne Rich
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There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.
Adrienne Rich
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There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
Adrienne Rich
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I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.
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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How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
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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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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In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment - not just in poetry - into the personal. A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women's movement, for instance, becoming support-groups or therapy groups.
Adrienne Rich