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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.

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
Written
Reading
Art
Poetics
Give
Studying
Everything
Poets
Giving
Poet
Mean
Poetry
Writing
Study

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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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.
Adrienne Rich
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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 is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.
Adrienne Rich
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I feel more helpless with you than without you.
Adrienne Rich
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To become a token woman - whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters - is to become something less than a man... since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.
Adrienne Rich
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...you look at me like an emergency
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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It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.
Adrienne Rich
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If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
Adrienne Rich
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Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother's and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
Adrienne Rich
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Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother ... when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.
Adrienne Rich
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Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
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
Adrienne Rich
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It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
Adrienne Rich
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I don't want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won't deal with it. If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.
Adrienne Rich
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I am suspicious - first of all, in myself - of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people's tendency to ... vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other 'exotic' ways of understanding.
Adrienne Rich
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich