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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

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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
Poetry
Hierarchy
Talking
Religions
Use
Organized
Priestly
Women
Uncomfortable
Hierarchies
Littles
Believer
Demoralized
Little
Gay
Gays
Many
Profession
Persecuted
Including
Believers

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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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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For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
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Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others. It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.
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Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
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I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
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You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.
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No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
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Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
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I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives.
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What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
Adrienne Rich
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How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying. To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.
Adrienne Rich
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As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.
Adrienne Rich
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I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
Adrienne Rich
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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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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
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The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
Adrienne Rich
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Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
Adrienne Rich
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Lying is done with words and also with silence.
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Abortion is violence a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
Adrienne Rich