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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.

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
Matter
Longing
Disregarded
Self
Despair
Erased
Writers
Numbness
Hear
Complacency
Break
Selves
Help
Encounter
Society
Encounters
Helping
Extent

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
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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It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple
Adrienne Rich
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I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class. What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.
Adrienne Rich
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
Adrienne Rich
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Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
Adrienne Rich
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Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
Adrienne Rich
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I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
Adrienne Rich
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We have lived with violence far too long.
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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We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
Adrienne Rich
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Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.
Adrienne Rich
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The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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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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These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
Adrienne Rich