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Quotes from Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 — Adrienne Rich

1929–2012 United States

← All quotes by Adrienne Rich

13 quotes

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

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)

If it is the present that calls us to activism, it is history that must nourish our choices and commitment.

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)

To be able to ask even the child's astonished question Why do they hate us so? means knowing how to say "we."

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)

I was admittedly young and trying to educate myself, but I was also doing something that is dangerous: I was flirting with identity.

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)

The experience of motherhood was eventually to radicalize me.

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)

Anti-Semitism was so intrinsic as not to have a name.

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)

According to Nazi logic, my two Jewish grandparents would have made me a Mischling, first-degree-nonexempt from the Final Solution.

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)

Sometimes I feel I have seen too long from too many disconnected angles: white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesbian, middle-class, feminist, exmatriate southerner, split at the root-that I will never bring them whole.

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)

It (1968) was a year of intensifying political awareness for me: the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, the Columbia strike.

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)

we need to know where we have been: we need our history.

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)

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.

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)

Feminism has always been shaped and fired by the question How can things be other than they are? What if...? (p190 "The Soul of a Woman's College")

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)

Patriarchy is no more an abstraction than imperialism is, once you have tasted it in your mouth, felt it across your flesh. ("North American Tunnel Vision" 1983)

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Adrienne Rich (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.