Quotes from Adrienne Rich

because in times like these to have you listen at all, it's necessary to talk about trees.

My husband spoke eagerly of the children we would have; my parents-in-law awaited the birth of their grandchild. I had no idea of what I wanted, what I could or could not choose. I only knew that to have a child was to assume adult womanhood to the full, to prove myself, to be 'like other women.

As soon as I was visibly and clearly pregnant, I felt, for the first time in my adolescent and adult life, not-guilty.

I experienced my depressions, bursts of anger, sense of entrapment, as burdens my husband was forced to bear because he loved me.

Across the freeway stands another structure from the other side of the mirror it destroys the logical processes of the mind, a man's thoughts become completely disorganized, madness streaming from every throat frustrated sounds from the bars, metallic sounds from the walls the steel trays, iron beds bolted to the wall, thr smells, the human waste. To determine how men will behave once they enter prison it is of first importance to know that prison.

We learn, often through painful self-discipline and self-cauterization, those qualities which are supposed to be 'innate' in us: patience, self-sacrifice, the willingness to repeat endlessly the small, routine chores of socializing a human being.

I feel grief at the waste of myself in those years, anger at the mutilation and manipulation of the relationship between mother and child, which is the great original source and experience of love.

RELIQUARY The bones of saints are praised above their flesh, That pale rejected garment of their lives In which they walked despised, uncanonized. Brooding upon the marble bones of time Men read strange sanctity in lost events, Hold requiem mass for murdered yesterdays, And in the dust of actions once reviled Find symbols traced, and freeze them into stone.

I have dreamed of going to bed as walking into clear water ringed by a snowy wood

The body has been made so problematic for women that is has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.

What I carried away in the end was a determination to heal-insofar as an individual woman can, and as much as possible with other women--the separation between mind and body; never again to lose myself both psychically and physically in that way

had a marriage and a child. If there were doubts, if there were periods of null depression or active despairing, these could only mean that I was ungrateful, insatiable, perhaps a monster.

Miller identifies the 'hidden cruelty' in child-rearing as the repetition of 'poisonous pedagogy' inflicted by the parents of the generation before and as providing the soil in which obedience to authoritarianism and fascism take root

Institutionalized motherhood demands of women maternal 'instinct' rather than intelligence, selflessness rather than self-realization, relation to others rather than the creation of self. Motherhood is 'sacred' so long as its offspring are 'legitimate' -- that is, as long as the child bears the name of a father who legally controls the mothe.r

My 'temper' was a dark, wicked blotch in me, not a response to events in the outer world.

If he is to know 'his' children, he must have control over their reproduction, which means he musut possess their mother exclusively...it cuts back to the male need to say: 'I, too, have the power of procreation--these are my seed, my own begotten children, my proof of elemental power.' In addition, of course, the children are the future receivers of the patrimony.

The command of Yahweh: 'Be fruitful and multiply,' is an entirely patriarchal one; he is not invoking the Great Mother but bidding his sons beget still more sons.

Someone is writing a poem. Words are being set down in a force field. It's as if the words themselves have magnetic charges; they veer together or in polarity, they swerve against each other.

Anger and tenderness: my selves

even you, fellow creature, sister sitting across from me, dark with love, working like me to pick apart working with me to remake this trailing knitted thing, this cloth of darkness, this woman's garment, trying to save the skein

how do we account for the fact that laws, legends, and prohibitions relating to women have, from the early patriarchal myths (e.g. Eve) through the medieval witch-massacres and the gynocide of female infants down to the modern rape laws, mother-in-law jokes, and the sadistic pornography of our time, been hostile and defensive, rather than 'protective'?

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

Clara, I feel so full of work, the life I see ahead, and love for you, who of all people however badly I say this will hear all I say and cannot say.

Finally, a woman who has experienced her own mother as a destructive force--however justified or unjustified the charge--may dread the possibility that in becoming a mother she too will become somehow destructive. The mother of the laboring woman is, in any case, for better or worse, living or dead, a powerful ghost in the birth-chamber.