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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
Life
Living
Hole
Running
Thin
Past
Holes
Soul
Worth
Muster
Children
Strength
Abandonment
Even
Building
Torn
Make
Child
Rush
Love
Purpose
Layers
More quotes by Adrienne Rich
You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
Adrienne Rich
Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
Adrienne Rich
The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?
Adrienne Rich
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.
Adrienne Rich
How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
Adrienne Rich
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.
Adrienne Rich
Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.
Adrienne Rich
But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
Adrienne Rich
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.
Adrienne Rich
Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
Adrienne Rich
We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
Adrienne Rich
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
There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
Adrienne Rich
I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.
Adrienne Rich
We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
Adrienne Rich
I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.
Adrienne Rich
The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
Adrienne Rich
It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.
Adrienne Rich
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.
Adrienne Rich
Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
Adrienne Rich
