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To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.

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
Way
Vision
Essentials
Make
Ways
Seek
Effort
Failing
Living
Dreams
Dream
Room
Experimentation
Also
Rooms
Visions
Even
Respect
Fails
Trying
Serious
Essential

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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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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It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple
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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I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.
Adrienne Rich
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We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
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 is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
Adrienne Rich
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How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying. To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
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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In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment - not just in poetry - into the personal. A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women's movement, for instance, becoming support-groups or therapy groups.
Adrienne Rich
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You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
Adrienne Rich
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Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
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 came to explore the wreck.
Adrienne Rich
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The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
Adrienne Rich
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The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
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.
Adrienne Rich
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False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.
Adrienne Rich
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As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression and art is a historical target for such efforts.
Adrienne Rich