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In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

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
Naming
Oppression
Silence
Violence
Language
Power
World

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It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
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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.
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Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
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Experience is always larger than language.
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Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
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You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.
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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
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We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
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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.
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Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
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If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
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Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we're not young.
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... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.
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A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'”
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You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
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... this world gives no room to be what we dreamt of being
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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
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The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
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As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.
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Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
Adrienne Rich