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.
ADRIENNE RICHAs her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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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The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
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In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
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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.
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The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits.
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Show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.
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So endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
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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.
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Freud rediscovered the underworld of consciousness that European rationalism had denied. But when you have a nation of people in therapy and counselling.
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In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment – not just in poetry – into the personal.
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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are.
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There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
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Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants.
ADRIENNE RICH






