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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.

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
Seem
Surgery
Mother
Perform
Ends
Desperate
Seems
Attempt
Radical
Overlap
Begins
Dangerously
Daughter
Blur
Personality
Personalities

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A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
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Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
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... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars to escape writing of the worst thing of all-- not the crimes of other, not even our own death, but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?
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The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
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As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression and art is a historical target for such efforts.
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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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When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
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The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.
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The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
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Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
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If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
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Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
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Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
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The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?
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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
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We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
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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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We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
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Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
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