It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!' — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
“Every infant born is testimony to the intricacy and breadth of possibilities inherent in humanity. Yet from birth* in most homes and… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons. — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both. — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack. — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
“Vous travaillez pour l'armee, madame?' (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
“RAUSCHENBERG’S BED How a bed once dressed with a kindly quilt becomes unsleepable site of anarchy What body holes expressed their exaltation loathing… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother's; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
“in a curious and unanticipated way, we really do welcome the birth of our child. There” — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
“Women have married because it was necessary, in order to survive economically, in order to have children who would not suffer economic… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
“If your voice could overwhelm those waters, what would it say? What would it cry of the child swept under, the mother… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
In the middle-class United States, a veneer of "alternative lifestyles" disguises the reality that, here as everywhere, women's apparent "choices" whether or… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
“Well, she's long about her coming, who must be more merciless to herself than history. Her mind full to the wind, I see her… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrotea letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!' — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
The women's movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free. — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image