Adrienne Rich Quotes

143 quotes in 2032 categories

• Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked…
• I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that…
• Life on the planet is born of woman.
• Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
• We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
• The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
• A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
• It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
• We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.
• If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
• Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
• I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a…
• Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
• 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…
• They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide,…
• No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with…
• The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of…
• 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 breast, an avid…
• Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the…
• How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

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