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 RICHMotherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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In a society where some people are far more educated than others, in which public education is ill-funded – here I am speaking of the U.S. – while we build more and more prisons to incarcerate youth who ought to be in school.
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[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who – for whatever reasons – are less conscious of what they are living through.
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The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
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In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
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I’ve known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us.
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“Global culture” is of course not a culture: it’s the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.
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Whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?
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Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep.
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The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.
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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.
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The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political
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Made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language – this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
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Any woman’s death diminishes me.
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Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
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The password is a flicker of an eyelash.
ADRIENNE RICH