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If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.

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
Fingers
Delta
Flow
Flows
Five
Grasp
Story
River
Stories
Bed
Think
Direction
Thinking
Rivers
Spread
Springing

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from Transcendental Etude
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I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
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I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel.
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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.
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Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.
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Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
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... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'”
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Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
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The password is a flicker of an eyelash.
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The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.
Adrienne Rich
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The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
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.
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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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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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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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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What we see, we see and seeing is changing
Adrienne Rich
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The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.
Adrienne Rich
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The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.
Adrienne Rich