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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.

Adrienne Rich

Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.
ADRIENNE RICH

Beyond Daughter Exchanged Female Mother Survival Transmitted Two Verbally
We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
ADRIENNE RICH

Intended Moving Our Privilege Responsible Verbal Words
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
ADRIENNE RICH

Complicated Delusion Fake False Journey Memories Naming Past People Real
The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
ADRIENNE RICH

Connection Feminist Force Inspirational Motivational Planet Problem Transforming Women
I don’t want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won’t deal with it.
ADRIENNE RICH

Generation Idea Irrelevant Raised Succumb Tech Television
One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women’s choices concerning childbirth.
ADRIENNE RICH

Birth Code Cultural Giving Law Professional Religious
Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.
ADRIENNE RICH

Feeling Guileless Intolerance Myself Selfishness Sometimes
The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics.
ADRIENNE RICH

Arctic Deaadnededness Dead Doors Key Leftism Male Politics Revolution Tolerance Word
They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide…?
ADRIENNE RICH

Belong Death Famine Pain Persuade Suicide Wose
Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative – that we’re just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different – that this is human destiny, this is human nature.
ADRIENNE RICH

Alternative Consciousness Destiny Flow Grain Idea
Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.
ADRIENNE RICH

Community Intelligence Intimacy Motherhood Power Thinking Transformed
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.
ADRIENNE RICH

Air Animal Blazing Budding City Dappled Exuberantly Imagined Passion Scar Sulfuric Sycamores Tree
Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
ADRIENNE RICH

All Equal Grief Tear Women
The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
ADRIENNE RICH

Adolescence Carrying Lesbian Limb Sexuality Stretch
If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.
ADRIENNE RICH

Been Compared Elder Generation Teach Worship
To allow what you’re reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers.
ADRIENNE RICH

Answer Carnal Charted Impermeable Ordinary Pierce Reading Right Routine Safe
There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice…In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist.
ADRIENNE RICH

Art Country Formula Human Justice m Relationship Overall Separate Simple Think
Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
ADRIENNE RICH

Assumption Drenched Know Ourselves Until
This is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
ADRIENNE RICH

Errant One Orphaned Own Seem Sporadic Thinking Tradition Way Women Work
The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
ADRIENNE RICH

Amnesia Liar Lying Silence Suffer Unconscious
But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?
ADRIENNE RICH

Children Enter Freedom Man Mother Room Think Travel Wife Work
I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.
ADRIENNE RICH

Body Instrument Mind relief Shape Trying
The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.
ADRIENNE RICH

Miracle More People Thinking Together Two
“What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?” Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?
ADRIENNE RICH

Each Explore Other Society Stake Stories Want
There being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence
ADRIENNE RICH

Being Daily Exile Migration Rending Riddled Search Shared Silence Work
We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation.
ADRIENNE RICH

Control Greed Little May Poem Power Technological
I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.
ADRIENNE RICH

Alone Book Both Certainly Conscious Library Mean Page Person Poem Poet Voice Writing

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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