Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
ADRIENNE RICH“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.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.
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That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.
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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
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I am suspicious – first of all, in myself – of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people’s tendency to … vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other ‘exotic’ ways of understanding.
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So endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
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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.
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What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.
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One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.
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But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.
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Strangers are an endangered species.
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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.
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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