When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
ADRIENNE RICHWe are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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That primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.
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A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
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Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.
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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.
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Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.
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The marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.
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It is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.
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As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow.
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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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I came to explore the wreck.
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The women’s movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked.
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The ocean, whose tides respond, like women’s menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins.
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It’s been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.
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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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To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.
ADRIENNE RICH