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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.

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
Particular
Child
Process
Reciprocal
Sense
Motherhood
Part
Intense
Children
Identity
Time
Female
Relationship

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Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
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Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.
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...you look at me like an emergency
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If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.
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How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
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The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
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The moment of change is the only poem.
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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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Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.
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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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Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
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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.
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Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
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As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.
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How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying. To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.
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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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When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.
Adrienne Rich
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Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
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I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included
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Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
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