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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.

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
Running
Thin
Past
Holes
Soul
Worth
Muster
Children
Strength
Abandonment
Even
Building
Torn
Make
Child
Rush
Love
Purpose
Layers
Life
Living
Hole

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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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To do something very common, in my own way.
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These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
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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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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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The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits. The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
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Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
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We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.
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Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.
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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
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I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.
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As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.
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It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
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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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I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel.
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It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
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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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The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
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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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