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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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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
Words
Powers
Language
Breath
Art
Breaths
Debased
Music
Speech
Technologically
Matter
Poetry
Manic
Time
Imagination
Tempo
Public
Bodily
Voice
Continues

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from Transcendental Etude
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A language is a map of our failures
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I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.
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To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.
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Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
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The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
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...you look at me like an emergency
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We have lived with violence far too long.
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Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
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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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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 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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Lying is done with words and also with silence.
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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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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
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The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.
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Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we're not young.
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The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.
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In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
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A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.
Adrienne Rich