Adrienne Rich Quotes About Mothers

Quotes about: Mothers

• How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

  Adrienne Rich

  Daughter, Mother, Son

  Adrienne Rich (2016). “Collected Poems: 1950-2012”, p.470, W. W. Norton & Company

• 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

  Mother, Children, War

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

• 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

  Daughter, Mother, Personality

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

• It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'

  Adrienne Rich

  Mothers Day, Children, Eye

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

• 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 cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.

  Adrienne Rich

  Mother, Heart, Son

• The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.

  Adrienne Rich

  Inspiring, Mothers Day, Children

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

• But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?…we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.

  Adrienne Rich

  Mother, Children, Men

• We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.

  Adrienne Rich

  Daughter, Mother, Confusion

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

• Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.

  Adrienne Rich

  Daughter, Mother, Two

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

• But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.

  Adrienne Rich

  Mother, Mind, Body

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

• 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

  Mother, Realization, States

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

• 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

  Mother, Son, Men

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978”, p.123, W. W. Norton & Company

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