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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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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
Men
Safe
Leaves
Beside
Marginal
Thinking
Vision
Message
Brains
Tunnel
Brain
Messages
Central
Sexist
Girl
Figure
Standard
Variables
Young
Standards
Dependent
Tunnels
Women
Foundation
Male
Burns
Littles
Girls
Males
Grammar
Solipsistic
Little
Figures
Lays
Norm
Deviants

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I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
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We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.
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We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
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Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.
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There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice...In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist.
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Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.
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Only where there is language is there world.
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Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
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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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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 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.
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As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.
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Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative - that we're just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different - that this is human destiny, this is human nature.
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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.
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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
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There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.
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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.
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Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.
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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
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Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother's and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
Adrienne Rich