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Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single I or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.

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
Thinking
Poetry
Coming
Single
Position
Imagine
Voice
Increasingly
Different
Voices
Think
Theatre

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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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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Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
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It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
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We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
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Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
Adrienne Rich
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Global culture is of course not a culture: it's the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.
Adrienne Rich
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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
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Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative - that we're just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different - that this is human destiny, this is human nature.
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Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.
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It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
Adrienne Rich
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In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
Adrienne Rich
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Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
Adrienne Rich
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Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.
Adrienne Rich
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Any woman's death diminishes me.
Adrienne Rich
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I've known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us, whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?
Adrienne Rich
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I feel more helpless with you than without you.
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