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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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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
Moments
Terror
Marketed
Littles
Daily
Melodrama
Live
Memory
Suspense
Little
Mere
Continuity
Without
Terrible
Reduced
Way
Memories
Nostalgia
Life
Moment
Screen
Lives
Screens
Salable

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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
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... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.
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Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
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Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?
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A language is a map of our failures
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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.
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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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What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.
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To do something very common, in my own way.
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...you look at me like an emergency
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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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Over many years so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me - it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry.
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To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.
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Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls.
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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...?
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How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
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No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
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I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
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Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.
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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.
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