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The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.

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
Purpose
Words
Treasures
Done
Prevail
Purposes
Maps
Damage
Treasure
Came

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
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There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
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If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.
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Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
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Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.
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I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.
Adrienne Rich
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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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In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it's the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.
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The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
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When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.
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One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.
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I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.
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The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?
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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
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.
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All new learning looks at first like chaos.
Adrienne Rich
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TV has created a kind of false collectivity.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
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.
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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
Adrienne Rich