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When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.

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
Like
Mirror
World
Mirrors
Teacher
Seeing
Looking
Speak
Someone
Nothing
Speaks

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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... this world gives no room to be what we dreamt of being
Adrienne Rich
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An honorable human relationship ... is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
Adrienne Rich
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Abortion is violence a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
Adrienne Rich
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It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
Adrienne Rich
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The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.
Adrienne Rich
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I don't want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won't deal with it. If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.
Adrienne Rich
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In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it's the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.
Adrienne Rich
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What we see, we see and seeing is changing
Adrienne Rich
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If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.
Adrienne Rich
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I came to explore the wreck.
Adrienne Rich
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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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A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
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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Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
Adrienne Rich
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A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.
Adrienne Rich
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To do something very common, in my own way.
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?
Adrienne Rich