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

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from Splittings
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Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
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Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
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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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There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
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What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it.
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Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.
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False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.
Adrienne Rich
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I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
Adrienne Rich
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.
Adrienne Rich
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You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.
Adrienne Rich
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One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.
Adrienne Rich
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...you look at me like an emergency
Adrienne Rich
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Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts hence, grappling with hard work.
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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No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
Adrienne Rich
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Life on the planet is born of woman.
Adrienne Rich
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When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich