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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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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
Moral
Absolutes
War
Absolute
Like
Defeat
Despair
Response
Physical
Failure
Imagination
Confusion

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Reality, the oppressor's tongue.
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I came to explore the wreck.
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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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Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single I or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.
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... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.
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We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
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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.
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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.
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To do something very common, in my own way.
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I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.
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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.
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I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.
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motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
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The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
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I've known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us, whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?
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I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.
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In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.
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Strangers are an endangered species.
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Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.
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Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
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