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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.
Adrienne Rich
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Pursuing dreams and visions is crucial, as is the willingness to experiment and learn from failures.

Adrienne Rich emphasizes the importance of both dreaming and taking action to realize those dreams. She suggests that embracing new ways of living and being open to experimentation is vital, even if those attempts do not always lead to success. This highlights a growth mindset where effort and the willingness to fail are respected as part of the journey towards achieving our visions.

Themes

DreamsExperimentationFailureVisionEffort

In practice

Example use cases

In a motivational speech about innovation in the workplace.

More from Adrienne Rich

My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.
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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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A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'”
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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. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
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It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
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It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
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