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Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination. (p17, III: "What would we create?")

— Adrienne Rich What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993)

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More quotes by Adrienne Rich

Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple. And there are colonised poetics and resilient poetics, transmissions across frontiers not easily traced.

Experience is always larger than language.

Interview (1991)

I have to say that what I know I know through making poems.

Poetry and Experience (1964)

Of course, like the consciousness behind it, behind any art, a poem can be deep or shallow, glib or visionary, prescient or stuck in an already lagging trendiness.

I believe in the necessity for a poetic language untethered from the compromised language of state and media.

Arts of the Possible (2000)

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All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now.

Hunter S. Thompson

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

George Santayana Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true.

Ulysses S. Grant Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Adrienne Rich (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.