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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.

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
Always
Path
List
Imagination
Lists
Read
Hardly
Sense
Touched
Makes
Poet
Many
Poetry
Paths
Great
Deal
Opened
Years
Deals
Poets

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
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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.
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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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In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
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Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.
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Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls.
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The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
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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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Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
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The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
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Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.
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I've known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us, whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?
Adrienne Rich
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Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.
Adrienne Rich
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... 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?
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Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
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.
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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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The women's movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked. I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.
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Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
Adrienne Rich
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Re-vision -- the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
Adrienne Rich