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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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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
Back
Join
Heart
River
Drop
Dust
Held
Rivers
Dried
Lips
Refused
Grief
Wears

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
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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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A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
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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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I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.
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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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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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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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Any woman's death diminishes me.
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Re-vision -- the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
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I define politics as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.
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Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
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The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
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There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice...In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist.
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But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?…we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.
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The password is a flicker of an eyelash.
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Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.
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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.
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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.
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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