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

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If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
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I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.
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The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.
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The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
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I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child
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We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
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If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
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I define politics as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.
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Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
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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.
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Strangers are an endangered species.
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A language is a map of our failures
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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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Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
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If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
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Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
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The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.
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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
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