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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
Mind
Actual
Bodies
Minds
Mother
Women
Body
Firsts
First
Mothers

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I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.
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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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If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
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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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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
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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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We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.
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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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What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
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A language is a map of our failures
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To write as if your life depended on it to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.
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Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work, waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.
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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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Global culture is of course not a culture: it's the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.
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Any woman's death diminishes me.
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The belief that established science and scholarship--which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making--are objectiveand value-free and that feminist studies are unscholarly, biased, and ideological dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological there is no neutrality in
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I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.
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When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders ... then I began to wonder
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The worker can unionize, go out on strike mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
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