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

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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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.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
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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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.
Adrienne Rich
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Only where there is language is there world.
Adrienne Rich
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I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
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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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
Adrienne Rich
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Global culture is of course not a culture: it's the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.
Adrienne Rich
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Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins, What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories? Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?
Adrienne Rich
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I am suspicious - first of all, in myself - of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people's tendency to ... vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other 'exotic' ways of understanding.
Adrienne Rich
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The moment of change is the only poem.
Adrienne Rich
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Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
Adrienne Rich
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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.
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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A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
Adrienne Rich
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As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.
Adrienne Rich
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You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
Adrienne Rich