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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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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
Physical
Heterosexuality
Cost
Resisted
Poverty
Imprisonment
Often
Imposed
Social
Extreme
Women
Torture
Subliminally
Extremes
Ostracism
Everywhere
Forcibly

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As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression and art is a historical target for such efforts.
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You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
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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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A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
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Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
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Abortion is violence a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
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False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.
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When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
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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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Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.
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The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual - all of that fermenting together. It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.
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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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But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?…we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.
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Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts hence, grappling with hard work.
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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
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How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
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What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
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I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included
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I came to explore the wreck.
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It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.
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