Adrienne Rich Quotes

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are.

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.

I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which ‘sexism’ is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed ‘patrivincialism’ or patrochialism.

To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously.

In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world.

Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.

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

But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.

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.

When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders … then I began to wonder