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We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
Adrienne Rich
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Memory is a nutriment, and seeds stored for centuries can still germinate.
Adrienne Rich
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I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
Adrienne Rich
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Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
Adrienne Rich
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Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother... when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.
Adrienne Rich
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Now, again, poetry
violent, arcane, common,
hewn of the commonest living substance
into archway, portal, frame
I grasp for you, your bloodstained splinters, your
ancient and stubborn poise
– as the earth trembles –
burning out from the grain
Adrienne Rich
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To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.
Adrienne Rich
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A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
The beak that grips her, she becomes.
Adrienne Rich
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How we dwelt in two worlds
the daughters and the mothers
in the kingdom of the sons.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps—no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.
Adrienne Rich
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Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.
Adrienne Rich
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To be young
Was always to live in other peoples' houses
Whose peace, if we sought it, had been made by others,
Was ours at second-hand and not for long.
Adrienne Rich
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Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.
Adrienne Rich
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I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed.
Adrienne Rich
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I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
Adrienne Rich
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Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
Adrienne Rich
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Day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.
Adrienne Rich
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The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.
Adrienne Rich
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Piece by piece I seem
to re-enter the world.
Adrienne Rich
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Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
Adrienne Rich
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Only to have a grief
equal to all these tears!
Adrienne Rich
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Women have been driven mad, gaslighted, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other's sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.
Adrienne Rich
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Quote of the day
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
Adrienne Rich
Creative Commons
Born:
May 16, 1929
Died:
March 27, 2012
(aged 82)
Bio:
Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist.
Known for:
Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (1973)
A change of world (1951)
The Dream of a Common Language (1978)
An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991)
Most used words:
women
truth
woman
life
male
human
love
child
history
bodies
language
poetry
men
power
touch
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