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But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.

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
Struggle
Possibilities
Imagination
Recognition
Less
Radical
Keep
Survival
Place
Carry
Nothing
Mere
Possibility
Lucid
Beyond
Impatient

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.
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The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.
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If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
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If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
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For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
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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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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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It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple
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The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
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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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Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative - that we're just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different - that this is human destiny, this is human nature.
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In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
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Lying is done with words and also with silence.
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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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A language is a map of our failures
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I came to explore the wreck.
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I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.
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I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.
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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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A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
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