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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.

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
Darkness
Instructive
Personal
Rejecting
Often
Treasures
Found
Continuity
Light
Treasure
Change
Deeply
Life
Painful
Dialectic
People
Meant
Dialectics

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
Adrienne Rich
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I feel more helpless with you than without you.
Adrienne Rich
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What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.
Adrienne Rich
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... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.
Adrienne Rich
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Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.
Adrienne Rich
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In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite) we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.
Adrienne Rich
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I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
Adrienne Rich
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False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day ... the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.
Adrienne Rich
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A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
Adrienne Rich
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My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
Adrienne Rich
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The password is a flicker of an eyelash.
Adrienne Rich
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We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
Adrienne Rich
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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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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
Adrienne Rich
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In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment - not just in poetry - into the personal. A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women's movement, for instance, becoming support-groups or therapy groups.
Adrienne Rich
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It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
Adrienne Rich
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Experience is always larger than language.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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We have lived with violence far too long.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich