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The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.

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
World
Stills
Transform
Power
Description
Still
Necessity
Reason
Poet
Enough
Poetry
Trying
Words
Believe
Language
Descriptions
Good
Fear
Stated

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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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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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
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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.
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Abortion is violence a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
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Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
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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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What we see, we see and seeing is changing
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Women's art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.
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One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women's choices concerning childbirth.
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A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.
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I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
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It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
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We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
Adrienne Rich
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Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
Adrienne Rich
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The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
Adrienne Rich
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Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine
Adrienne Rich
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Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.
Adrienne Rich
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The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
Adrienne Rich