Quote

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

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Adrienne Rich
Age: 82 †
Born: 1929
Born: May 16
Died: 2012
Died: March 27
Essayist
Feminist
Peace Activist
Poet
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Adrienne Cecile Rich
Adrienne Cécile Rich
Adrienne Riche
Fear
Cease
Purely
Mother
Exists
Breasts
Women
Remain
Feminism
Infantilism
Human
Son
Possess
Lullaby
Humans
Beings
Longing
Continuous
Whole
Becoming
Male
Infant
Much
Attention
Males
Associated
Men
Woman
Provide
Breast

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

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Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single I or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.
Adrienne Rich
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Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.
Adrienne Rich
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I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.
Adrienne Rich
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
Adrienne Rich
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We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
Adrienne Rich
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We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.
Adrienne Rich
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Reality, the oppressor's tongue.
Adrienne Rich
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What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it.
Adrienne Rich
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Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
Adrienne Rich
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I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.
Adrienne Rich
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You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
Adrienne Rich
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If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
Adrienne Rich
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In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment - not just in poetry - into the personal. A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women's movement, for instance, becoming support-groups or therapy groups.
Adrienne Rich
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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 had never asked. I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.
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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These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
Adrienne Rich
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... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.
Adrienne Rich
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Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
Adrienne Rich
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Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
Adrienne Rich
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We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
Adrienne Rich