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

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.
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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.
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Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
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I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
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motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
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I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.
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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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We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
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We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
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...you look at me like an emergency
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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.
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Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
Adrienne Rich
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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
Adrienne Rich
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A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
Adrienne Rich
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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
Adrienne Rich
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One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women's choices concerning childbirth.
Adrienne Rich
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Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine
Adrienne Rich
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If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.
Adrienne Rich
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The belief that established science and scholarship--which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making--are objectiveand value-free and that feminist studies are unscholarly, biased, and ideological dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological there is no neutrality in
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You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
Adrienne Rich