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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

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
Performance
Splitting
False
Mistrust
Performances
Transcendental
Poverty
Glamour
Longer
Beside
Open
Truths
Lives
Cast
Live
Casts
Theatricality

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?
Adrienne Rich
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False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.
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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Any woman's death diminishes me.
Adrienne Rich
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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
Adrienne Rich
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I define politics as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.
Adrienne Rich
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The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
Adrienne Rich
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Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
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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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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The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
Adrienne Rich
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When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders ... then I began to wonder
Adrienne Rich
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Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.
Adrienne Rich
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Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
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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Reality, the oppressor's tongue.
Adrienne Rich
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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
Adrienne Rich
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Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins, What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories? Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?
Adrienne Rich
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What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it.
Adrienne Rich
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A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
Adrienne Rich