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I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives.

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
Helping
Deals
Keep
Choices
Live
Help
Great
Words
Paralyzed
Something
Language
Verbal
Believe
Moving
Tone
Lives
Deal
Inspirational
Move

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.
Adrienne Rich
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We have lived with violence far too long.
Adrienne Rich
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In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite) we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.
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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What we see, we see and seeing is changing
Adrienne Rich
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A language is a map of our failures
Adrienne Rich
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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
Adrienne Rich
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Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.
Adrienne Rich
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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
Adrienne Rich
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The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
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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Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
Adrienne Rich
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It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
Adrienne Rich
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The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from Transcendental Etude
Adrienne Rich
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I've known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us, whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?
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