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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.

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
Made
Approve
Mind
Cherish
Choices
Child
Woman
Father
Wanted
Children

More quotes by 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.
Adrienne Rich
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Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
Adrienne Rich
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All new learning looks at first like chaos.
Adrienne Rich
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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
Adrienne Rich
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Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
Adrienne Rich
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I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
Adrienne Rich
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Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.
Adrienne Rich
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I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from Splittings
Adrienne Rich
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Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
Adrienne Rich
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We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.
Adrienne Rich
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In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world, if poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.
Adrienne Rich
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We have lived with violence far too long.
Adrienne Rich
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Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
Adrienne Rich
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Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.
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
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich