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I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.

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
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Possibility
Possibilities
Human
Among
Empathy
Humans
Conditions
Mutual
Men
Particular
Extremely
Think
Simply
Condition
Thinking
Creative
Suffer
Lesbians
People
Understanding
Gay
Homophobia
Suffering
Active
Solidarity

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
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The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.
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Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts hence, grappling with hard work.
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I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child
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When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
Adrienne Rich
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I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from Splittings
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The moment of change is the only poem.
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Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.
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Strangers are an endangered species.
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Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
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Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
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We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too political, merely oral and thus unreliable.
Adrienne Rich
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I long to create something that can't be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every 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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Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
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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I've known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us, whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?
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The worker can unionize, go out on strike mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
Adrienne Rich