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

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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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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The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
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When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.
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I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.
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Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others. It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.
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Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
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I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
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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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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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Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.
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It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
Adrienne Rich
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... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.
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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
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Reality, the oppressor's tongue.
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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The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
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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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There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
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The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.
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Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.
Adrienne Rich