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When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.

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
Women
Truths
Tells
Healing
Space
Woman
Tell
Makes
Truth

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
Adrienne Rich
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Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
Adrienne Rich
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It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand.
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Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
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There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
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As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.
Adrienne Rich
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Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
Adrienne Rich
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What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.
Adrienne Rich
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I don't want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won't deal with it. If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.
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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A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
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
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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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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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No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.
Adrienne Rich
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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
Adrienne Rich
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What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
Adrienne Rich
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Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
Adrienne Rich
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I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.
Adrienne Rich
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A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
Adrienne Rich