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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.

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
Women
Body
Firsts
First
Mothers
Mind
Actual
Bodies
Minds
Mother

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There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
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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.
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I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child
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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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The moment of change is the only poem.
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Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.
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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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To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.
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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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We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.
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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
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An honorable human relationship ... is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
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The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
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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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Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative - that we're just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different - that this is human destiny, this is human nature.
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Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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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
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To do something very common, in my own way.
Adrienne Rich
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... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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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.
Adrienne Rich