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Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.

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
Race
Exempt
Whether
Servitude
Speak
Largely
Human
Oppression
Humans
Condition
Sex
Usually
Conditions
Oppressions

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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
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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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You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
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I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
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Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.
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Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.
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One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.
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A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.
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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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We have lived with violence far too long.
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I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
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We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too political, merely oral and thus unreliable.
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If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.
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My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
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Life on the planet is born of woman.
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How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
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Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
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To do something very common, in my own way.
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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
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