I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.
ADRIENNE RICH
The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn’t there a difficulty of saying ‘we’? You cannot speak for me.
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.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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 -
To do something very common, in my own way.
ADRIENNE RICH -
When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
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 -
We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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 -
The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
ADRIENNE RICH