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Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

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
Suspicion
Life
Fantasy
Wedding
Like
Mere
Cake
Pieces
Rumour
Rich
Edge
Rumours
Fact
Prime
Crumbling
Experience
Edges
Knife
Facts
Useless
Knives
Mind
Heavy

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?…we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.
Adrienne Rich
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Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we're not young.
Adrienne Rich
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Only where there is language is there world.
Adrienne Rich
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The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
Adrienne Rich
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Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
Adrienne Rich
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I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.
Adrienne Rich
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What we see, we see and seeing is changing
Adrienne Rich
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Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.
Adrienne Rich
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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
Adrienne Rich
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...you look at me like an emergency
Adrienne Rich
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... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
Adrienne Rich
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Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.
Adrienne Rich
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We have lived with violence far too long.
Adrienne Rich
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I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included
Adrienne Rich
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One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.
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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What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it.
Adrienne Rich
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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
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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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