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What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it.

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
Cities
Hope
Change
Live
Must
Changing
Mean
Despair
Would
City
People
Whose

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Only where there is language is there world.
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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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Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
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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.
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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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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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In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world, if poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.
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The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
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Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls.
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We have lived with violence far too long.
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Abortion is violence a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
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Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins, What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories? Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?
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Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
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A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.
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Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
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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.
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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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The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
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