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Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?

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
Remember
Live
Life
Poets
Poet
Poetry
Taught
Thought

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
Adrienne Rich
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The password is a flicker of an eyelash.
Adrienne Rich
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When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.
Adrienne Rich
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I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives.
Adrienne Rich
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The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual - all of that fermenting together. It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.
Adrienne Rich
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If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
Adrienne Rich
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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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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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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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Strangers are an endangered species.
Adrienne Rich
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The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
Adrienne Rich
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As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.
Adrienne Rich
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Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.
Adrienne Rich
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Any woman's death diminishes me.
Adrienne Rich
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The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To see the light too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
Adrienne Rich
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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
Adrienne Rich
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Only where there is language is there world.
Adrienne Rich
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There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice...In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist.
Adrienne Rich
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You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.
Adrienne Rich
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Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.
Adrienne Rich