Adrienne Rich Quotes, Daughter Quotes, Mother Quotes

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.

4 years ago

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Daughter Quotes , Mother Quotes

The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from "Transcendental Etude

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Poverty Quotes , Transcendental Quotes

White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn't brought up to hate. But hate isn't the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness - that primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Hate Quotes , Passion Quotes

There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. 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

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Unseen Quotes , Looks Quotes

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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Struggle Quotes , Imagination Quotes

How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

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Only where there is language is there world.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , World Quotes

motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Motherhood Quotes , Assumption Quotes

The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits. The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Important Quotes , Culture Quotes

Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Pride Quotes

If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Peace Quotes , Ubuntu Quotes

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. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Children Quotes , Feelings Quotes

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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Mother Quotes , Children Quotes

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.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Song Quotes , Art Quotes

The belief that established science and scholarship--which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making--are "objective"and "value-free" and that feminist studies are "unscholarly," "biased," and "ideological" dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture!

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Feminist Quotes

I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Thinking Quotes , World Quotes

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

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I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Health Education Quotes

There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice...In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist.

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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Country Quotes , Art Quotes

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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Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Self Quotes , Numbness Quotes