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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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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
Years
Twenty
Love
Twenties
Blazed
Kill
Typed
Line
Detachment
Wall
Glorify
Lines
Oppression
Art
Torture
Also
Cruelty

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Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
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There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
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No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
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Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.
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To become a token woman - whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters - is to become something less than a man... since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.
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The password is a flicker of an eyelash.
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Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls.
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The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To see the light too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
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Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
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The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.
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Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.
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It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.
Adrienne Rich
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We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
Adrienne Rich
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Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
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The moment of change is the only poem.
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