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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
Didn
Even
Life
Chose
Tools
Choose
Ones
Wrong

More quotes by 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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The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits. The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
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In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.
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When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
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Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
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No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
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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How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
Adrienne Rich
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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
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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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.
Adrienne Rich
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A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
Adrienne Rich
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Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
Adrienne Rich
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Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
Adrienne Rich
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Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine
Adrienne Rich
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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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Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.
Adrienne Rich
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The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.
Adrienne Rich
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I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.
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