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There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.

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
Body
Terrain
Nothing
Patriarchy
Men
Whatsoever
Revolutionary
Bodies
Control
Woman
Women
Erected

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.
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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.
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
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Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
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Reality, the oppressor's tongue.
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Re-vision -- the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
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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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If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
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What we see, we see and seeing is changing
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My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
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I came to explore the wreck.
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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.
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For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
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A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'”
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It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
Adrienne Rich
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I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
Adrienne Rich
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When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
Adrienne Rich
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I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.
Adrienne Rich
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If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
Adrienne Rich