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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.

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
Power
Mesh
Human
Elemental
Humans
Elementals
Great
Assumptions
Love
Motherhood
Relations
Assumption
Lurk
Relation
Entangled

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from Splittings
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I am suspicious - first of all, in myself - of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people's tendency to ... vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other 'exotic' ways of understanding.
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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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My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
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To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.
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The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.
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What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
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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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If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.
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I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
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It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.
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Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
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We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too political, merely oral and thus unreliable.
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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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A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
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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.
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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 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.
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I don't want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won't deal with it. If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.
Adrienne Rich