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

More quotes by 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.
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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
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The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.
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[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.
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To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.
Adrienne Rich
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I don't want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won't deal with it. If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.
Adrienne Rich
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I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.
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The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political
Adrienne Rich
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How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.
Adrienne Rich
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We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
Adrienne Rich
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Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
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 have lived with violence far too long.
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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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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These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
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In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
Adrienne Rich
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What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.
Adrienne Rich