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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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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
General
Tended
Seen
Historians
White
Grounds
History
Historian
Write
Male
Oral
Political
Males
Fads
Didn
Thus
Unreliable
Writing
Merely
Dismiss

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.
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Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine
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In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.
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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In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
Adrienne Rich
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They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide...?
Adrienne Rich
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The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
Adrienne Rich
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Lying is done with words and also with silence.
Adrienne Rich
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I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.
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
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Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others. It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.
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
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Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?
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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... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars to escape writing of the worst thing of all-- not the crimes of other, not even our own death, but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?
Adrienne Rich
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The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
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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When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.
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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As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression and art is a historical target for such efforts.
Adrienne Rich