Quote

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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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
Another
Name
Around
Imagination
Experimentally
Might
Names
Naming
Nothing
Call
Opposite
Play
Turns
Opposites
Writing
Free
Notion
Love
Hate
Sacred
Night
Turn

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.
Adrienne Rich
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A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
Adrienne Rich
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The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
Adrienne Rich
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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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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
Adrienne Rich
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Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.
Adrienne Rich
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In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.
Adrienne Rich
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Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
Adrienne Rich
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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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Strangers are an endangered species.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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A language is a map of our failures
Adrienne Rich
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The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
Adrienne Rich
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Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?
Adrienne Rich
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I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.
Adrienne Rich
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Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process it is not an identity for all time.
Adrienne Rich
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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?
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