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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.

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
Woman
Authorities
Certain
Prime
Life
Rarely
Limited
Powers
Authority
Whose
Faces
Severely

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.
Adrienne Rich
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I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel.
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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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There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
Adrienne Rich
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Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
Adrienne Rich
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No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
Adrienne Rich
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The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
Adrienne Rich
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There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
Adrienne Rich
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Strangers are an endangered species.
Adrienne Rich
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I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
Adrienne Rich
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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!'
Adrienne Rich
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In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
Adrienne Rich
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A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
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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Life on the planet is born of woman.
Adrienne Rich
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Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins, What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories? Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?
Adrienne Rich
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Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
Adrienne Rich
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I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.
Adrienne Rich