Adrienne Rich - Woman Quotes

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When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

Adrienne Rich
To become a token woman—whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters—is to become something less than a man … since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.

Adrienne Rich
No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.

Adrienne Rich
There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.

Adrienne Rich
I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.

Adrienne Rich
Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.

Adrienne Rich
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 lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother's son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.

Adrienne Rich
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
The beak that grips her, she becomes.

Adrienne Rich
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
The most notable fact that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.

Adrienne Rich