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

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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.
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Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
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I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.
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Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother ... when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.
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I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.
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When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders ... then I began to wonder
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I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
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Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
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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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A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
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The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
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I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel.
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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.
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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
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The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
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Only where there is language is there world.
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We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
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As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.
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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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The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.
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