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We Are, None Of Us, 'either' Mothers Or Daughters; To Our Amazement, Confusion, And Greater Complexity, We Are Both.
-Adrienne Rich
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We Are, None Of

Adrienne Rich
...
We Are, None Of Us, 'either' Mothers Or Daughters; To Our Amazement, Confusion, And Greater Complexity, We Are Both.

Understanding the Quote: "we are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters; to our amazement,..."

This quote by Adrienne Rich reflects deeply on the theme of daughter. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Daughter, Mother, Confusion, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Adrienne Rich interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich is celebrated for insightful thoughts on daughter and mother. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

Views: 98352
Topic
Daughter
Mother
Confusion
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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.
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I Don't Want To Succumb To The Idea That For The Generation, Or Generations, Raised On Television, The Text Is Irrelevant Or So Intimidating That They Won't Deal With It. If You Teach, You See This Is Not True. It May Be That Newer Generations Do Not Worship The Text As Some Of Their Elders Do.
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You Have To Give Your Art Everything You Can - I Don't Mean Only Writing, But Studying Other Poets And Poetics, Thinking, Reading What Poets Have Written Other Than Their Poetry.
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An Honorable Human Relationship ... Is A Process, Delicate, Violent, Often Terrifying To Both Persons Involved, A Process Of Refining The Truths They Can Tell Each Other.
Violent
Process
Honorable
A Decade Of Cutting Away Dead Flesh, Cauterizing Old Scars Ripped Open Over And Over And Still It Is Not Enough.
Cutting
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Scar
The Unconscious Wants Truth. It Ceases To Speak To Those Who Want Something Else More Than Truth.
Truth
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There Must Be Those Among Whom We Can Sit Down And Weep And Still Be Counted As Warriors.
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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.
Thinking
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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.
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When My Dreams Showed Signs Of Becoming Politically Correct No Unruly Images Escaping Beyond Borders ... Then I Began To Wonder
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... How Have I Used Rivers, How Have I Used Wars To Escape Writing Of The Worst Thing Of All-- Not The Crimes Of Other, Not Even Our Own Death, But The Failure To Want Our Freedom Passionately Enough So That Blighted Elms, Sick Rivers, Massacres Would Seem Mere Emblems Of That Desecration Of Ourselves?
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When Someone With The Authority Of A Teacher Describes The World And You’re Not In It, There’s A Moment Of Psychic Disequilibrium, As If You Looked Into A Mirror And Saw Nothing.
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To Read As If Your Life Depended On It Would Mean To Let Into Your Reading Your Beliefs, The Swirl Of Your Dreamlife, The Physical Sensations Of Your Ordinary Carnal Life; And Simultaneously, To Allow What You're Reading To Pierce Routines, Safe And Impermeable, In Which Ordinary Carnal Life Is Tracked, Charted, Channeled. Then, What Of The Right Answers, The So-called Multiple-choice Examination Sheet With The Number 2 Pencil To Mark One Choice And One Choice Only?
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A Language Is A Map Of Our Failures
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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.
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...you Look At Me Like An Emergency
Looks
Emergencies
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Re-vision -- The Act Of Looking Back, Of Seeing With Fresh Eyes, Of Entering An Old Text From A New Critical Direction - Is For Women More Than A Chapter In Cultural History: It Is An Act Of Survival.
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The More I Live, The More I Think, Two People Together Is A Miracle.
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Every Poem Breaks A Silence That Had To Be Overcome.
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White Hate Crimes, White Hate Speech. I Still Try To Claim I Wasn't Brought Up To Hate. But Hate Isn't The Half Of It. I Grew Up In The Vast Encircling Presumption Of Whiteness - That Primary Quality Of Being Which Knows Itself, Its Passions, Only Against An Otherness That Has To Be Dehumanized. I Grew Up In White Silence That Was Utterly Obsessional. Race Was The Theme Whatever The Topic.
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Passion
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Whatever Is Unnamed, Undepicted In Images, Whatever Is Omitted From Biography, Censored In Collections Of Letters, Whatever Is Misnamed As Something Else, Made Difficult-to-come-by, Whatever Is Buried In The Memory By The Collapse Of Meaning Under An Inadequate Or Lying Language - This Will Become, Not Merely Unspoken, But Unspeakable.
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Each Feminist Work Has Tended To Be Received As If It Emerged From Nowhere; As If Each One Of Us Had Lived, Thought, And Worked Without Any Historical Past Or Contextual Present. This Is One Of The Ways In Which Women's Work And Thinking Has Been Made To Seem Sporadic, Errant, Orphaned Of Any Tradition Of Its Own.
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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.
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The Liar Leads An Existence Of Unutterable Loneliness.
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Liars
Lying
We've Learned A Lot From The Great Psychologists. Wilhelm Reich Wrote About The Relationship Between Fascism And Sexual Repression. Freud Rediscovered The Underworld Of Consciousness That European Rationalism Had Denied. But When You Have A Nation Of People In Therapy And Counselling, "support" Groups For Every Kind Of Human Condition, Where, In The Clichés Of That Milieu, People "share" And "heal," The Question, "what For?", "what Now?" Is No Longer Asked.
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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.
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I Keep Coming Back To You In My Head, But You Couldn't Know That, And I Have No Carbons.
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No One Has Imagined Us. We Want To Live Like Trees, Sycamores Blazing Through The Sulfuric Air, Dappled With Scars, Still Exuberantly Budding, Our Animal Passion Rooted In The City.
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But Nothing Less Than The Most Radical Imagination Will Carry Us Beyond This Place, Beyond The Mere Struggle For Survival, To That Lucid Recognition Of Our Possibilities Which Will Keep Us Impatient, And Unresigned To Mere Survival.
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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.
Loser
Responsible
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There Is No Simple Formula For The Relationship Of Art To Justice...in The End, I Don’t Think We Can Separate Art From Overall Human Dignity And Hope. My Concern For My Country Is Inextricable From My Concerns As An Artist.
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One Does Not Give Birth In A Void, But Rather In A Cultural And Political Context. Laws, Professional Codes, Religious Sanctions, And Ethnic Traditions All Affect Women's Choices Concerning Childbirth.
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I Am A Citizen Of A Country That Has Just Undergone A Thieved Election, A Country Deeply And Dangerously Divided Between Rich And Poor, But Also Between Rich And Middle Class. What I Believe In And What My Government Represents Are Not The Same Thing.
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Government
Sexist Grammar Burns Into The Brains Of Little Girls And Young Women A Message That The Male Is The Norm, The Standard, The Central Figure Beside Which We Are All Deviants, The Marginal, The Dependent Variables. It Lays The Foundation For Androcentric Thinking, And Leaves Men Safe In Their Solipsistic Tunnel-vision.
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I've Had To Guess At Her, Sewing Her Skin Together As I Sew Mine, Though With A Different Stitch
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That's Why I Want To Speak To You Now. To Say: No Person, Trying To Take Responsibility For Her Or His Identity, Should Have To Be So Alone. There Must Be Those Among Whom We Can Sit Down And Weep, And Still Be Counted As Warriors. (i Make Up This Strange, Angry Packet For You, Threaded With Love.) I Think You Thought There Was No Such Place For You, And Perhaps There Was None Then, And Perhaps There Is None Now; But We Will Have To Make It, We Who Want An End To Suffering, Who Want To Change The Laws Of History, If We Are Not To Give Ourselves Away.
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What Kind Of Beast Would Turn Its Life Into Words?
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I Am The Androgyne, I Am The Living Mind You Fail To Describe In Your Dead Language The Lost Noun, The Verb Surviving Only In The Infinitive The Letters Of My Name Are Written Under The Lids Of The Newborn Child
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If You Are Trying To Transform A Brutalized Society Into One Where People Can Live In Dignity And Hope, You Begin With The Empowering Of The Most Powerless. You Build From The Ground Up.
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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.
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I Came To Explore The Wreck.
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The Word Revolution Itself Has Become Not Only A Dead Relic Of Leftism, But A Key To The Deadendedness Of Male Politics: The Revolution Of A Wheel Which Returns In The End To The Same Place; The Revolving Door Of A Politics Which Has Liberated Women Only To Use Them, And Only Within The Limits Of Male Tolerance.
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Grief Held Back From The Lips Wears At The Heart; The Drop That Refused To Join The River Dried Up In The Dust.
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Reality, The Oppressor's Tongue.
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Poetry Is Above All A Concentration Of The Power Of Language, Which Is The Power Of Our Ultimate Relationship To Everything In The Universe.
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The Ocean, Whose Tides Respond, Like Women's Menses, To The Pull Of The Moon, The Ocean Which Corresponds To The Amniotic Fluid In Which Human Life Begins, The Ocean On Whose Surface Vessels (personified As Female) Can Ride But In Whose Depth Sailors Meet Their Death And Monsters Conceal Themselves... It Is Unstable And Threatening As The Earth Is Not; It Spawns New Life Daily, Yet Swallows Up Lives; It Is Changeable Like The Moon, Unregulated, Yet Indestructible And Eternal.
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To Do Something Very Common, In My Own Way.
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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.
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We Move But Our Words Stand Become Responsible For More Than We Intended And This Is Verbal Privilege
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Over Many Years So Many Poets Have Touched My Imagination And Opened Paths For Me - It Hardly Makes Sense To List Them. I Have Always Read A Great Deal Of Poetry.
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If You Think You Can Grasp Me, Think Again: My Story Flows In More Than One Direction, A Delta Springing From The River Bed With Its Five Fingers Spread.
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One Direction
Rivers
If We Had Time And No Money, Living By Our Wits, What Story Would You Tell?
Stories
Wit
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Weather Abroad And Weather In The Heart Alike Come On Regardless Of Prediction.
Heart
Weather
Predictions
There Is No 'the Truth','a Truth' - Truth Is Not One Thing, Or Even A System. It Is An Increasing Complexity. The Pattern Of The Carpet Is A Surface. When We Look Closely, Or When We Become Weavers, We Learn Of The Tiny Multiple Threads Unseen In The Overall Pattern, The Knots On The Underside Of The Carpet
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False History Gets Made All Day, Any Day, The Truth Of The New Is Never On The News False History Gets Written Every Day ... The Lesbian Archaeologist Watches Herself Sifting Her Own Life Out From The Shards She's Piecing, Asking The Clay All Questions But Her Own.
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Clay
Watches
How We Dwelt In Two Worlds The Daughters And The Mothers In The Kingdom Of The Sons.
Daughter
Mother
Son
Poetry Reaches Into Places In Us That We Are Suppose To Ignore Or Mistrust, That Are Perceived As Subversive Or Non-useful, In What Is Fast Becoming Known As Global Culture.
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We May Feel Bitterly How Little Our Poems Can Do In The Face Of Seemingly Out-of-control Technological Power And Seemingly Limitless Corporate Greed, Yet It Has Always Been True That Poetry Can Break Isolation, Show Us To Ourselves When We Are Outlawed Or Made Invisible, Remind Us Of Beauty Where No Beauty Seems Possible, Remind Us Of Kinship Where All Is Represented As Separation.
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May
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The Beauty Of Darkness Is How It Lets You See.
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Women Have Always Been Seen As Waiting: Waited To Be Asked, Waiting For Our Menses, In Fear Lest They Do Or Do Not Come, Waiting For Men To Come Home From Wars, Or From Work, Waiting For Children To Grow Up, Or For The Birth Of A New Child, Or For Menopause.
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War
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.
Daughter
Mother
Personality
Probably There Is Nothing In Human Nature More Resonant With Charges Than The Flow Of Energy Between Two Biologically Alike Bodies, One Of Which Has Lain In Amniotic Bliss Inside The Other, One Of Which Has Labored To Give Birth To The Other. The Materials Are Here For The Deepest Mutuality And The Most Painful Estrangement.
Two
Giving
Energy
A Book Of Poems Doesn't Just Come Out By Chance, An Editor Has To Select It, A Publisher Has To Distribute It Or You Will Never See It.
Book
Editors
Chance
Your Mind Now, Moldering Like Wedding-cake, Heavy With Useless Experience, Rich With Suspicion, Rumour, Fantasy, Crumbling To Pieces Under The Knife-edge Of Mere Fact. In The Prime Of Your Life.
Knives
Cake
Mind
Experience Is Always Larger Than Language.
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Language
I Think About The Possibilities For Empathy, For Mutual Solidarity Among Gay Men And Lesbians, Not Simply As People Who Suffer Under Homophobia, But As People Who Are Also Extremely Creative, Active, And Have A Particular Understanding Of The Human Condition.
Gay
Men
Thinking
A Life I Didn't Choose Chose Me: Even My Tools Are The Wrong Ones For What I Have To Do.
Life
Tools
Lies Are Usually Attempts To Make Everything Simpler - For The Liar - Than It Really Is, Or Ought To Be.
Liars
Lying
Ought
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.
Book
Writing
Mean
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.
Lying
Men
Political
For Now, Poetry Has The Capacity - In Its Own Ways And By Its Own Means - To Remind Us Of Something We Are Forbidden To See.
Mean
Way
Capacity
Love, Our Subject: We've Trained It Like Ivy To Our Walls.
Wall
Ivy
Subjects
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.
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Realization
States
A President Cannot Meaningfully Honor Certain Token Artists While The People At Large Are So Dishonored.'”
Artist
People
Honor
War Is An Absolute Failure Of Imagination, Scientific And Political.
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Imagination
Political
The Belief That Established Science And Scholarship--which Have So Relentlessly Excluded Women From Their Making--are "objective"and "value-free" And That Feminist Studies Are "unscholarly," "biased," And "ideological" Dies Hard. Yet The Fact Is That All Science, And All Scholarship, And All Art Are Ideological; There Is No Neutrality In Culture!
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Feminist
Culture
I Have An Inward Treasure Born With Me, Which Can Keep Me Alive If All The Extraneous Delights Should Be Withheld Or Offered Only At A Price I Cannot Afford To Give.
Giving
Delight
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A Thinking Woman Sleeps With Monsters.
Sleep
Thinking
Monsters
Lesbian Existence Comprises Both The Breaking Of A Taboo And The Rejection Of A Compulsory Way Of Life. It Is Also A Direct Or Indirect Attack On The Male Right Of Access To Women.
Rejection
Males
Heterosexuality
I Touch You Knowing We Weren't Born Tomorrow, And Somehow, Each Of Us Will Help The Other Live, And Somewhere, Each Of Us Must Help The Other Die.
Knowing
Tomorrow
Helping
To Write As If Your Life Depended On It; To Write Across The Chalkboard, Putting Up There In Public The Words You Have Dredged; Sieved Up In Dreams, From Behind Screen Memories, Out Of Silence-- Words You Have Dreaded And Needed In Order To Know You Exist.
Dream
Memories
Writing
Most Women Have Not Even Been Able To Touch This Anger, Except To Drive It Inward Like A Rusted Nail.
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Inward
Able
Even Where Love Has Run Thin The Child's Soul Musters Strength... The Rush Of Purpose To Make A Life Worth Living Past Abandonment Building The Layers Up Again Over The Torn Hole.
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Children
Past
It Iscrucial That We Understand Lesbian/feminism In The Deepest, Most Radical Sense: As That Love For Ourselves And Other Women, That Commitment To The Freedom Of All Of Us, Which Transcends The Category Of "sexual Preference" And The Issue Of Civil Rights, To Become A Politics Of Asking Women's Questions, Demanding A World In Which The Integrity Of All Women--not A Chosen Few--shall Be Honored And Validated In Every Respect Of Culture.
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Commitment
Issues
The Words Are Purposes./the Words Are Maps./i Came To See The Damage That Was Done/and The Treasures That Prevail.
Damage
Purpose
Done
A Patriot Is One Who Wrestles For The Soul Of Her Country As She Wrestles For Her Own Being.
Country
Soul
Patriotism
The Danger Lies In Forgetting What We Had. The Flow Between Generations Becomes A Trickle, Grandchildren Tape-recording Grandparents' Memories On Special Occasions Perhaps-no Casual Storytelling Jogged By Daily Life, There Being No Shared Daily Life What With Migrations, Exiles, Diasporas, Rendings, The Search For Work. Or There Is A Shared Daily Life Riddled With Holes Of Silence.
Memories
Lying
Grandchildren
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.
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Heart
Son
I Don’t Think We Can Separate Art From Overall Human Dignity And Hope.
Art
Thinking
Dignity
The Most Notable Fact That Our Culture Imprints On Women Is A Sense Of Our Limits. The Most Important Thing A Woman Can Do For Another Is To Illuminate Her Actual Possibilities.
Important
Culture
Limits
We Who Were Loved Will Never Unlive That Crippling Fever.
Love
Fever
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.
Inspiring
Mothers Day
Children
There Is The Falsely Mystical View Of Art That Assumes A Kind Of Supernatural Inspiration, A Possession By Universal Forces Unrelated To Questions Of Power And Privilege Or The Artist's Relation To Bread And Blood. In This View, The Channel Of Art Can Only Become Clogged And Misdirected By The Artist's Concern With Merely Temporary And Local Disturbances. The Song Is Higher Than The Struggle.
Song
Art
Inspiration
The Liar Often Suffers From Amnesia. Amnesia Is The Silence Of The Unconscious.
Liars
Lying
Silence
War Is An Absolute Failure Of Imagination, Scientific And Political. That A War Can Be Represented As Helping A People To 'feel Good' About Themselves, Or Their Country, Is A Measure Of That Failure.
Country
War
People
What I Discerned In The U.s. Was A Convergence Of Poetic Voices Coming From Many Different Rents In The Social Fabric, Many Cultures, Many Tributaries, Which, Together, Make Up The American Poetry Of The Late Twentieth Century.
Voice
Together
Different
I Define "politics" As The On-going Collective Struggle For Liberation And For The Power To Create - Not Only Works Of Art, But Also Just And Nonviolent Social Institutions.
Art
Struggle
Social
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.
Thinking
Support
Needs
We Have Seen Over And Over That White Male Historians In General Have Tended To Dismiss Any History They Didn't Themselves Write,on The Grounds That It Is Unserious, Unscholarly, A Fad, Too "political," "merely" Oral And Thus Unreliable.
Writing
White
History
Can You Remember? When We Thought The Poets Taught How To Live?
Life
Poetry
Taught
Any Woman's Death Diminishes Me.
Diminish
As A Society In Turmoil, We Are Going To See More, And More Various, Attempts To Simulate Order Through Repression; And Art Is A Historical Target For Such Efforts.
Art
Order
Effort
The Will To Change Begins In The Body, Not In The Mind.
Mind
Body
We Must Use What We Have To Invent What We Desire.
Success
Dream
Use It Or Lose It
There Is No 'the Truth,' 'a Truth'--truth Is Not One Thing, Or Even A System. It Is An Increasing Complexity.
Truth Is
Complexity
One Thing
Heterosexuality Has Been Forcibly And Subliminally Imposed On Women. Yet Everywhere Women Have Resisted It, Often At The Cost Of Physical Torture, Imprisonment, Psychosurgery, Social Ostracism, And Extreme Poverty.
Heterosexuality Is
Cost
Poverty
Sleeping. Turning In Turn Like Planets Rotating In Their Midnight Meadow: A Touch Is Enough To Let Us Know We're Not Alone In The Universe, Even In Sleep.
Sleep
Midnight
Enough
In The Nineteenth Year And The Eleventh Month Speak Your Tattered Kaddish For All Suicides: Praise To Life Though It Crumbled In Like A Tunnel On Ones We Knew And Loved Praise To Life Though Its Windows Blew Shut On The Breathing-room Of Ones We Knew And Loved Praise To Life Though Ones We Knew And Loved Loved It Badly, Too Well, And Not Enough Praise To Life Though It Tightened Like A Knot On The Hearts Of Ones We Thought We Knew Loved Us Praise To Life Giving Room And Reason To Ones We Knew And Loved Who Felt Unpraisable. Praise To Them, How They Loved It, When They Could.
Suicide
Heart
Years
The Necessity Of Poetry Has To Be Stated Over And Over, But Only To Those Who Have Reason To Fear Its Power, Or Those Who Still Believe That Language Is 'only Words' And That An Old Language Is Good Enough For Our Descriptions Of The World We Are Trying To Transform.
Believe
Poetry
Trying
... Passion For Survival Is The Great Theme Of Women's Poetry.
Passion
Poetry
Survival
I Think Of Poetry As Something Out There In The World And Within Each Of Us. I Don't Mean That Everyone Can Write Poetry - It's An Art, A Craft, It Requires Enormous Commitment Like Any Art. But There's A Core Of Desire In Each Of Us And Poetry Goes To And Comes From That Core. It's The Social, Economic, Institutional Gap That Makes It Difficult.
Art
Writing
Mean
False History Gets Made All Day, Any Day, The Truth Of The New Is Never On The News.
New Day
Historical
News
Responsibility To Yourself Means Refusing To Let Others Do Your Thinking, Talking, And Naming For You; It Means Learning To Respect And Use Your Own Brains And Instincts; Hence, Grappling With Hard Work.
Strong Women
Hard Work
Mean
But Before We Were Mothers, We Have Been, First Of All, Women, With Actual Bodies And Actual Minds.
Mother
Mind
Body
[the Poet] Is Endowed To Speak For Those Who Do Not Have The Gift Of Language, Or To See For Those Who - For Whatever Reasons - Are Less Conscious Of What They Are Living Through. It Is As Though The Risks Of The Poet's Existence Can Be Put To Some Use Beyond Her Own Survival.
Risk
Survival
Use
The Unconscious Wants Truth, As The Body Does. The Complexity And Fecundity Of Dreams Come From The Complexity And Fecundity Of The Unconscious Struggling To Fulfill That Desire. The Complexity And Fecundity Of Poetry Come From The Same Struggle.
Dream
Struggle
Desire
In 1945, Just At The End Of World War Ii, The American Poet Muriel Rukeyser Wrote A Remarkable Book Called The Life Of Poetry. In It She Says That On Any Particular Day In The World, If Poetry Ceased To Exist, It Would Immediately Be Reinvented On That Same Day.
War
Book
World
... In A History Of Spiritual Rupture, A Social Compact Built On Fantasy And Collective Secrets, Poetry Becomes More Necessary Than Ever: It Keeps The Underground Aquifers Flowing; It Is The Liquid Voice That Can Wear Through Stone.
Spiritual
Aquifers
Voice
No One Sleeps In This Room Without The Dream Of A Common Language.
Dream
Sleep
Rooms
Responsibility To Yourself Means That You Don't Fall For Shallow And Easy Solutions-it Means That You Refuse To Sell Your Talents And Aspirations Short.
Fall
Mean
Responsibility
I Believe That Words Can Help Us Move Or Keep Us Paralysed, And That Our Choices Of Language And Verbal Tone Have Something - A Great Deal - To Do With How We Live Our Lives And Whom We End Up Speaking With And Hearing; And That We Can Deflect Words By Trivialization, Of Course, But Also By Ritualized Respect, Or We Can Let Them Enter Our Souls And Mix With The Juices Of Our Minds.
Life
Respect
Believe
I Believe That Words Can Help Us Move Or Keep Us Paralyzed, And That Our Choices Of Language And Verbal Tone Have Something - A Great Deal - To Do With How We Live Our Lives.
Inspirational
Believe
Moving
In Order To Live A Fully Human Life We Require Not Only Control Of Our Bodies (though Control Is A Prerequisite); We Must Touch The Unity And Resonance Of Our Physicality, Our Bond With The Natural Order, The Corporeal Grounds Of Our Intelligence.
Order
Unity
Body
These Scars Bear Witness But Whether To Repair Or To Destruction I No Longer Know.
Bears
Scar
Destruction
Every Journey Into The Past Is Complicated By Delusions, False Memories, False Namings Of Real Events.
Fake People
Memories
Real
Abortion Is Violence; A Deep, Desperate Violence Inflicted By A Woman Upon, First Of All, Herself.
Abortion
Violence
Firsts
We Have Lived With Violence Far Too Long.
Long
Violence
The Password Is A Flicker Of An Eyelash.
Eyelashes
Passwords
Flicker
Marriage Is Lonelier Than Solitude.
Solitude
When Someone With The Authority Of A Teacher, Say, Describes The World And You Are Not In It, There Is A Moment Of Psychic Disequilibrium, As If You Looked Into A Mirror And Saw Nothing. Yet You Know You Exist And Others Like You, That This Is A Game With Mirrors. It Takes Some Strength Of Soul--and Not Just Individual Strength, But Collective Understanding--to Resist This Void, This Nonbeing, Into Which Are Thrust, And To Stand Up, Demanding To Be Seen And Heard.
Teacher
Mirrors
Individual Strength
Whatever Happens With Us, Your Body Will Haunt Mine
Body
Whatever Happens
Mines
No One Ever Told Us We Had To Study Our Lives,make Of Our Lives A Study, As If Learning Natural Historyor Music, That We Should Beginwith The Simple Exercises Firstand Slowly Go On Tryingthe Hard Ones, Practicing Till Strengthand Accuracy Became One With The Daringto Leap Into Transcendence, Take The Chance Of Breaking Down In The Wild Arpeggioor Faulting The Full Sentence Of The Fugue.
Exercise
Simple
Goes On
The Moment Of Change Is The Only Poem.
Change
Healing
Poetry
They Can Rule The World While They Can Persuade Us Our Pain Belongs In Some Order Is Death By Famine Worse Than Death By Suicide, Than A Life Of Famine And Suicide...?
Death
Suicide
Pain
An Honorable Human Relationship- That Is, One In Which Two People Have The Right To Use The Word "love"- Is A Process, Delicate, Violent, Often Terrifying To Both Persons Involved, A Process Of Refining The Truths They Can Tell Each Other. It Is Important To Do This Because It Breaks Down Human Self-delusion And Isolation. It Is Important To Do This Because In Doing So We Do Justice To Our Own Complexity. It Is Important To Do This Because We Can Count On So Few People To Go That Hard Way With Us.
Love
Self
Two
It Is Important To Possess A Short-term Pessimism And A Long-term Optimism.
Long
Optimism
Important
I Feel More Helpless With You Than Without You.
Without You
Feels
Helpless
My Heart Is Moved By All I Cannot Save: So Much Has Been Destroyed I Have To Cast My Lot With Those Who Age After Age, Perversely, With No Extraordinary Power, Reconstitute The World.
Heart
Age
World
When The Landscape Buckles And Jerks Around, When A Dust Column Of Debris Rises From The Collapse Of A Block Of Buildings On Bodies That Could Have Been Your Own, When The Staves Of History Fall Awry And The Barrel Of Time Bursts Apart, Some Turn To Prayer, Some To Poetry: Words In The Memory, A Stained Book Carried Close To The Body, The Notebook Scribbled By Hand--a Center Of Gravity.
Notebook
Prayer
Memories
Pride Is A Tricky, Glorious, Double-edged Feeling.
Inspirational
Pride
Feelings
Poetry Can Open Locked Chambers Of Possibiity, Restore Numbed Zones To Feeling, Recharge Desire.
Feelings
Desire
Chamber
All New Learning Looks At First Like Chaos.
Looks
Firsts
Chaos
Poetry Can Add Its Grain To An Accumulation Of Consciousness Against The Idea That There Is No Alternative - That We're Just In The Great Flow Of Capitalism And It Can Never Be Any Different - That This Is Human Destiny, This Is Human Nature.
Destiny
Ideas
Flow
It's As If, In The Mother's Eyes, Her Smile, Her Stroking Touch, The Child First Reads The Message:'you Are There!'
Mothers Day
Children
Eye
The Repossession By Women Of Our Bodies Will Bring Far More Essential Change To Human Society Than The Seizing Of The Means Of Production By Workers.
Mean
Aquariums
Essentials
You Must Write, And Read, As If Your Life Depended On It.
Writing
Ifs
I Am A Feminist Because I Feel Endangered, Psychically And Physically, By This Society And Because I Believe That The Women's Movement Is Saying That We Have Come To An Edge Of History When Men - Insofar As They Are Embodiments Of The Patriarchal Idea - Have Become Dangerous To Children And Other Living Things, Themselves Included
Children
Believe
Bad Ass
Change Is Not A Threat To Your Life, But An Invitation To Live.
Threat
Invitations
I Long To Create Something That Can't Be Used To Keep Us Passive: I Want To Write A Script About Plumbing, How Every Pipe Is Joined To Every Other.
Knowledge
Writing
Long
It Is The Suffering Of Ambivalence: The Murderous Alternation Between Bitter Resentment And Raw-edged Nerves, And Blissful Gratification And Tenderness
Suffering
Nerves
Resentment
The Serious Revolutionary, Like The Serious Artist, Can't Afford To Lead A Sentimental Or Self-deceiving Life.
Artist
Self
Sentimental
In This Disintegrative, Technologically-manic Time, When Public Language Is So Debased, Poetry Continues To Matter Because It's The Art That Reintegrates Words, Speech, Voice, Breath, Music, Bodily Tempo, And The Powers Of The Imagination.
Art
Voice
Imagination
Behind All Art Is An Element Of Desire...love Of Life, Of Existence, Love Of Another Human Being, Love Of Human Beings Is In Some Way Behind All Art — Even The Most Angry, Even The Darkest, Even The Most Grief-stricken, And Even The Most Embittered Art Has That Element Somewhere Behind It. Because How Could You Be So Despairing, So Embittered, If You Had Not Had Something You Loved That You Lost?
Art
Grief
Love Life
We Might Possess Every Technological Resource... But If Our Language Is Inadequate, Our Vision Remains Formless, Our Thinking And Feeling Are Still Running In The Old Cycles, Our Process May Be 'revolutionary' But Not Transformative.
Running
Thinking
Romance
Not Biology, But Ignorance Of Ourselves, Has Been The Key To Our Powerlessness
Ignorance
Keys
Biology
... This World Gives No Room To Be What We Dreamt Of Being
Giving
World
Rooms
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.
Winning
Men
Self
I Think My Work Comes Out Of Both An Intense Desire For Connection And What It Means To Feel Isolated. There's Always Going To Be A Kind Of Tidal Movement Back And Forth Between The Two.
Mean
Thinking
Two
In [family Snapshots] The Flow Of Profane Time Has Been Stopped And A Sacred Interval Of Self-conscious Revelation Has Been Cut From It By The Edge Of The Picture Frame And The Light Of The Sun Or The Flash.
Cutting
Light
Self
To Work And Suffer Is To Be At Home. All Else Is Scenery.
Home
Suffering
Scenery
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.
Mother
Children
Men
Motherhood Is The Great Mesh In Which All Human Relations Are Entangled, In Which Lurk Our Most Elemental Assumptions About Love And Power.
Motherhood
Assumption
Mesh
Art, Whose Honesty Must Work Through Artifice, Cannot Avoid Cheating Truth.
Cheating
Art
Honesty
My Children Cause Me The Most Exquisite Suffering Of Which I Have Any Experience. It Is The Suffering Of Ambivalence: The Murderous Alternation Between Bitter Resentment And Raw-edged Nerves, And Blissful Gratification And Tenderness. Sometimes I Seem To Myself, In My Feelings Toward These Tiny Guiltless Beings, A Monster Of Selfishness And Intolerance.
Children
Feelings
Suffering
Saw You Walking Barefoot Taking A Long Look At The New Moon's Eyelid Later Spread Sleep-fallen, Naked In Your Dark Hair Asleep But Not Oblivious Of The Unslept Unsleeping Elsewhere Tonight I Think No Poetry Will Serve Syntax Of Rendition: Verb Pilots The Plane Adverb Modifies Action Verb Force-feeds Noun Submerges The Subject Noun Is Choking Verb Disgraced Goes On Doing Now Diagram The Sentence
Sleep
Dark
Thinking
Language Is Power... Language Can Be Used As A Means Of Changing Reality.
Writing
Mean
Reality
The Longer I Live The More I Mistrust Theatricality, The False Glamour Cast By Performance, The More I Know Its Poverty Beside The Truths We Are Salvaging From The Splitting-open Of Our Lives. -from "transcendental Etude
Poverty
Transcendental
Glamour
Across The Curve Of The Earth, There Are Women Getting Up Before Dawn, In The Blackness Before The Point Of Light, In The Twilight Before Sunrise; There Are Women Rising Earlier Than Men And Children To Break The Ice, To Start The Stove, To Put Up The Pap, The Coffee, The Rice, To Iron The Pants, To Braid The Hair, To Pull The Day's Water Up From The Well, To Boil Water For Tea, To Wash The Children For School, To Pull The Vegetables And Start The Walk To Market, To Run To Catch The Bus For The Work That Is Paid. I Don't Know When Most Women Sleep.
Running
Children
Twilight
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.
Voice
Political
Asking
Only Where There Is Language Is There World.
World
Language
Art Means Nothing If It Simply Decorates The Dinner Table Of Power Which Holds It Hostage.
Art
Mean
Dinner Table
Those Who Speak Largely Of The Human Condition Are Usually Those Most Exempt From Its Oppressions - Whether Of Sex, Race, Or Servitude.
Sex
Race
Speak
No Woman Is Really An Insider In The Institutions Fathered By Masculine Consciousness.
Consciousness
Institutions
Masculine
I Guess What Concerns Me Always Is The Need For A Field, A Rich Compost, For Any Art To Flourish. But However Isolate Or Unheard You May Feel, If You Have The Need To Write Poetry, Are Compelled To Write It, You Go On, Whether There Is Resonance Or Not.
Art
Writing
Needs
Despair, When Not The Response To Absolute Physical And Moral Defeat Is, Like War, The Failure Of Imagination.
War
Imagination
Confusion
The Decision To Feed The World Is The Real Decision. No Revolution Has Chosen It. For That Choice Requires That Women Shall Be Free.
Real
Choices
Decision
I'd Call It Love If Love Didn't Take So Many Years But Lust Too Is A Jewel.
Sex
Jewels
Years
Art And Literature Have Given So Many People The Relief Of Feeling Connected - Pulled Us Out Of Isolation. It Has Let Us Know That Somebody Else Breathed And Dreamed And Had Sex And Loved And Raged And Knew Loneliness The Way We Do.
Art
Sex
Loneliness
If The Imagination Is To Transcend And Transform Experience It Has To Question, To Challenge, To Conceive Of Alternatives, Perhaps To The Very Life You Are Living At The Moment.
Imagination
Challenges
Alternatives
In A World Where Language And Naming Are Power, Silence Is Oppression, Is Violence.
Silence
World
Violence
Lying Is Done With Words And Also With Silence.
Truth
Integrity
Liars
Can Individual Psychic Wounds Really Heal In An Abusive And Fragmented Society? Audre Lorde Has A Poem Which Begins, "what Do We Want From Each Other/ After We Have Told Our Stories?" Where Do We Go To Explore Our Stake With Others In Such A Society?
Psychics
Stories
Want
Until We Know The Assumptions In Which We Are Drenched, We Cannot Know Ourselves.
Assumption
Knows
It Will Take All Your Heart, It Will Take All Your Breath It Will Be Short, It Will Not Be Simple
Heart
Simple
Breaths
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.
Men
Body
Revolutionary
The Channel Of Art Can Only Become Clogged And Misdirected By The Artist's Concern With Merely Temporary And Local Disturbances. The Song Is Higher Than The Struggle.
Song
Art
Struggle
The [vietnam War Memorial] Wall Became A Magnet For Citizens Of Every Generation, Class, Race, And Relationship To The War Perhaps Because It Is The Only Great Public Monument That Allows The Anesthetized Holes In The Heart To Fill With A Truly National Grief.
Wall
War
Grief
It Is The Lesbian In Us Who Is Creative, For The Dutiful Daughter Of The Fathers In Us Is Only A Hack.
Daughter
Father
Creativity
The Difficulty Of Saying I-a Phrase From The East German Novelist Christa Wolf. But Once Having Said It, As We Realize The Necessity To Go Further, Isn't There A Difficulty Of Saying 'we'? You Cannot Speak For Me. I Cannot Speak For You. Two Thoughts: There Is No Liberation That Only Knows How To Say 'i'; There Is No Collective Movement That Speaks For Each Of Us All The Way Through.
Two
Phrases
Movement
In A Society Where Some People Are Far More Educated Than Others, In Which Public Education Is Ill-funded - Here I Am Speaking Of The U.s. - While We Build More And More Prisons To Incarcerate Youth Who Ought To Be In School, There Is Already A Gap Between Those With Education And Those Without. Those With Educational Privilege Can Be Seen As Arrogant, Remote, Alien - And Very Often They Believe Themselves Superior.
Educational
Believe
School
No Woman Is Really An Insider In The Institutions Fathered By Masculine Consciousness. When We Allow Ourselves To Believe We Are, We Lose Touch With Parts Of Ourselves Defined As Unacceptable By That Consciousness; With The Vital Toughness And Visionary Strength Of The Angry Grandmothers, The Fierce Market Women Of The Ibo's Women's War, The Marriage-resisting Women Silk Workers Of Pre-revolutionary China, The Millions Of Widows, Midwives, And The Women Healers Tortured And Burned As Witches For Three Centuries In Europe.
Inspiring
War
Believe
Tv Has Created A Kind Of False Collectivity.
Television
Tvs
Kind
The Suppressed Lesbian I Had Been Carrying In Me Since Adolescence Began To Stretch Her Limbs.
Sexuality
Limbs
Adolescence
Motherhood, In The Sense Of An Intense, Reciprocal Relationship With A Particular Child, Or Children, Is One Part Of Female Process; It Is Not An Identity For All Time.
Children
Motherhood
Identity
When I Talk Of Taking A Trip I Mean Forever.
Mean
Forever
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