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Experience is always larger than language.

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
Larger
Language
Experience
Always

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand.
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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Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
Adrienne Rich
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I came to explore the wreck.
Adrienne Rich
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These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
Adrienne Rich
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I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
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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... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.
Adrienne Rich
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It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
Adrienne Rich
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When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
Adrienne Rich
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What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
Adrienne Rich
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Women's art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.
Adrienne Rich
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I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.
Adrienne Rich
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Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?
Adrienne Rich
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What we see, we see and seeing is changing
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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When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
Adrienne Rich
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The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.
Adrienne Rich
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Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
Adrienne Rich
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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
Adrienne Rich