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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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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
Ones
Wrong
Didn
Even
Life
Chose
Tools
Choose

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
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I feel more helpless with you than without you.
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The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.
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A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
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Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine
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Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls.
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Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
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I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.
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I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
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The moment of change is the only poem.
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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!'
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No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
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Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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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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Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.
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Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
Adrienne Rich
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No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.
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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Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
Adrienne Rich