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I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.

Adrienne Rich

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
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
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
ADRIENNE RICH

Carpet Closely Look Multiple Threads Tiny Underside Unseen Weaver
When someone, let’s say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it’s like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.
ADRIENNE RICH

Looking Mirror Nothing Someone Speak Teacher World
The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
ADRIENNE RICH

Children Day Inspiring Mother Strike Tied Unionize Worker
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
An honorable human relationship … is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
ADRIENNE RICH

Delicate Honorable Human Involved Person Process Relationship Terrifying Truth Violent
We’ve learned a lot from the great psychologists. Wilhelm Reich wrote about the relationship between fascism and sexual repression.
ADRIENNE RICH

Fascism Great Group Learned People Psychologist Relationship Repression Sexual Support Wrote
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Apparated Asking Crucial Movement Political Voice Women
I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say ‘I’; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.
ADRIENNE RICH

Collective Know Liberation Movement Say Speak Thought
Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
ADRIENNE RICH

Act Back Chapter Critical Cultural Direction Entering Eye Eyes Fresh History Looking More Self Survival Test Woman
The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.
ADRIENNE RICH

Deepest Estrangement Material Most Mutuality Painful
the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
ADRIENNE RICH

Art Artist Channel Clogged Concern Merely Misdirected Song Struggle Temporary
A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
ADRIENNE RICH

Choose Even Life One Tool Wrong
There is already a gap between those with education and those without. Those with educational privilege can be seen as arrogant, remote, alien – and very often they believe themselves superior.
ADRIENNE RICH

Alien Believe Education Educational Gap Privilege Remote Superior
I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing.
ADRIENNE RICH

Believe Choice Help Keep Language Life Move Paralysed Respect

I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.

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Popular Authors

I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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