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... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.

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
Poetry
Passion
Women
Great
Theme
Survival
Poet

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.
Adrienne Rich
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To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.
Adrienne Rich
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Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.
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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If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
Adrienne Rich
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Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
Adrienne Rich
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Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.
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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False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day ... the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.
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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It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
Adrienne Rich
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Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we're not young.
Adrienne Rich
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I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
Adrienne Rich
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One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.
Adrienne Rich
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Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother ... when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.
Adrienne Rich
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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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But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.
Adrienne Rich
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In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it's the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.
Adrienne Rich
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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
Adrienne Rich
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We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.
Adrienne Rich