But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
ADRIENNE RICHI believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother’s; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
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When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders … then I began to wonder
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I’d call it love if love didn’t take so many years but lust too is a jewel.
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Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
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That’s why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone.
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Even where love has run thin the child’s soul musters strength… the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.
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Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work.
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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.
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Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.
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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are.
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Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
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Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
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Lying is done with words and also with silence.
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How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn’t themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too “political,” “merely” oral and thus unreliable.
ADRIENNE RICH