Quote

... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars to escape writing of the worst thing of all-- not the crimes of other, not even our own death, but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?

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
Seems
Sick
Emblems
Used
Failure
Massacres
Enough
Crime
Passionately
Writing
Seem
Crimes
Even
Worst
Wars
Thing
Freedom
Escape
Elms
Would
War
Rivers
Desecration
Death
Mere
Blighted

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.
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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
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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.
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There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
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If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
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and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.
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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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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 a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
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Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
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It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
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I define politics as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.
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Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
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In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
Adrienne Rich
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To write as if your life depended on it to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
Adrienne Rich
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Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative - that we're just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different - that this is human destiny, this is human nature.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich