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Abortion is violence a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.

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
Desperate
Deep
Violence
Upon
Woman
Firsts
First
Inflicted
Abortion

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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.
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Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
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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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To do something very common, in my own way.
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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.
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Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process it is not an identity for all time.
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Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother's and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
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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 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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I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.
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motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
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The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
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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 have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
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The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.
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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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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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Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
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You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.
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Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
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