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I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.

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
Thinking
Overall
Separate
Dignity
Hope
Art
Human
Humans
Think

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars to escape writing of the worst thing of all-- not the crimes of other, not even our own death, but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?
Adrienne Rich
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The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
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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TV has created a kind of false collectivity.
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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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.
Adrienne Rich
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motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
Adrienne Rich
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I long to create something that can't be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.
Adrienne Rich
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Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
Adrienne Rich
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Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.
Adrienne Rich
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I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.
Adrienne Rich
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It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
Adrienne Rich
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We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.
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
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How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
Adrienne Rich
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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
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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Only where there is language is there world.
Adrienne Rich
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The belief that established science and scholarship--which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making--are objectiveand value-free and that feminist studies are unscholarly, biased, and ideological dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological there is no neutrality in
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