Mother Quotes by Adrienne Rich

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

— Adrienne Rich

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

— Adrienne Rich

Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother ... when I knew I was still in a…

— Adrienne Rich

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

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

— Adrienne Rich

We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.

— 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…

— Adrienne Rich

Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that…

— Adrienne Rich

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

As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow, a huge…

— Adrienne Rich

Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it…

— Adrienne Rich

One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and…

— Adrienne Rich

The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate…

— Adrienne Rich

Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide…

— Adrienne Rich

But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a…

— Adrienne Rich