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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

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
Achieve
Success
Desire
Essayists
Use
Inventing
Dream
Invent
Must
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Feminist
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More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits. The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
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.
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When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.
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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.
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The worker can unionize, go out on strike mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
Adrienne Rich
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The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.
Adrienne Rich
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If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
Adrienne Rich
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Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.
Adrienne Rich
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You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.
Adrienne Rich
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Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others. It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.
Adrienne Rich
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In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
Adrienne Rich
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As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression and art is a historical target for such efforts.
Adrienne Rich
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I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.
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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A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.
Adrienne Rich
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In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
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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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.
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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I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from Splittings
Adrienne Rich