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We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.

Adrienne Rich

Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
ADRIENNE RICH

Able Anger Except Inward Nail Rusted Touch Women
It takes some strength of soul–and not just individual strength, but collective understanding–to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.
ADRIENNE RICH

Demanding Individual Nonbeing Resist Strength Void
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
ADRIENNE RICH

Count Few Hard Important People Way
The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
ADRIENNE RICH

Existence Liar Loneliness Lying Unutterable
Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others.
ADRIENNE RICH

Betrayed Caricature Electronic Mass Media Other People Target
When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart.
ADRIENNE RICH

Around Block Building Collapse Landscape Memories Notebook Prayer
Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other.
ADRIENNE RICH

Alike Biological Bodies Charges Energy Giving Human Nature Nothing Probably Resonant Two
In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
ADRIENNE RICH

Country Danger Present Tense
There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.
ADRIENNE RICH

Artist Boundaries Bursting Channel Choiceless Creative Enormous Hunger Merely System Working
Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins,
ADRIENNE RICH

Abusive Begin Heal Individual Psychic Society Stories Want
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 RICH

Children Experience Exquisite Feeling Most Suffering
The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.
ADRIENNE RICH

Miracle More People Thinking Together Two
Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
ADRIENNE RICH

Lonelier Marriage Solitude
Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else.
ADRIENNE RICH

Biography Censored Collection Image Letter Lying Memories Omitted Undepiched Unnamed
It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
ADRIENNE RICH

Ambivalence Blissful Gratification Murderous Nerves Resentment Suffering
“Support” groups for every kind of human condition, where, in the clichés of that milieu, people “share” and “heal,” the question, “What for?”, “What now?” is no longer asked.
ADRIENNE RICH

Asked Clinch Condition Group Heal Human Kind Longer Milieu Support

We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.

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We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.

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Popular Authors

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