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These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.

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
Bears
Longer
Whether
Repair
Scars
Scar
Witness
Bear
Destruction

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
Adrienne Rich
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Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?
Adrienne Rich
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... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.
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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Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.
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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A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
Adrienne Rich
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The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
Adrienne Rich
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Strangers are an endangered species.
Adrienne Rich
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An honorable human relationship ... is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
Adrienne Rich
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It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand.
Adrienne Rich
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Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
Adrienne Rich
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The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.
Adrienne Rich
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Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
Adrienne Rich
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TV has created a kind of false collectivity.
Adrienne Rich
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What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
Adrienne Rich
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The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political
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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It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
Adrienne Rich
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I long to create something that can't be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.
Adrienne Rich