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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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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
Nothing
Holds
Mean
Table
Tables
Dinner
Simply
Means
Art
Decorates
Power
Hostage

More quotes by 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.
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A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
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Life on the planet is born of woman.
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Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
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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?
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The women's movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked. I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.
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When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
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The moment of change is the only poem.
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[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
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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.
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My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
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We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.
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The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
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How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
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Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
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Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others. It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.
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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.
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I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
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Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.
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You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
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