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One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women's choices concerning childbirth.

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
Law
Affect
Codes
Religious
Cultural
Childbirth
Rather
Professional
Ethnic
Political
Code
Concerning
Doe
Tradition
Sanctions
Give
Laws
Traditions
Women
Birth
Context
Giving
Choices
Void

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
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TV has created a kind of false collectivity.
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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.
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I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.
Adrienne Rich
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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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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.
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When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders ... then I began to wonder
Adrienne Rich
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Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
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The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits. The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
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... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.
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If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.
Adrienne Rich
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Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
Adrienne Rich
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To become a token woman - whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters - is to become something less than a man... since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.
Adrienne Rich
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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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In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world, if poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.
Adrienne Rich
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The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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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?
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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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.
Adrienne Rich