Adrienne Rich (1929 - )
 

Adrienne Rich was first published as a poet in 1951, when she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. Her poetry has reflected her own life changes and many roles.

Adrienne Rich's feminism emerged in mid-career, and many of her later poems express a political rage and search for sisterhood and creative language.

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• Women have been the truly active people in all cultures, without whom human society would long ago have perished, though our activity has most often been on the behalf of men and children.

• 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.

• 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.

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

You are only what you are , when no one is looking. -Robert C. Edwards


To accept a benefit is to sell one's freedom. - Latin proverb


Better to wear out, than to rust out.- Unknown

The Dream of a Common Language...
 

VIII
I can see myself years back at Sunion,
hurting with an infected foot, Philoctetes
in woman’s form, limping the long path,
lying on a headland over the dark sea,
looking down the red rocks to where a soundless curl
of white told me a wave had struck,
imagining the pull of that water from that height,
knowing deliberate suicide wasn’t my métier,
yet all the time nursing, measuring that wound.
Well, that’s finished. The woman who cherished
her suffering is dead. I am her descendant.
I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me,
but I want to go on from here with you
fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.

Adrienne Rich

Katniss

Love is more than words. It is demonstrated through actions.
Love is manifested in the day-to-day occurrences of small kindnesses and spoken words.
Love is lending a patient ear and taking the time to care. (w)

gentleness
 

“Strong men can always afford to be gentle. Only the weak are intent on giving as good as they get.”--Elbert Hubbard

“In a gentle way, you can shake the world.”--Mahatma Gandhi

“No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.”--G. K. Chesterton

“The quality of mercy is not strained; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed- It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.”--William Shakespeare

“The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.”--Henry David Thoreau

bell hooks (1952 - )
 

Feminist, writer, and educator bell hooks (she prefers the lower case spelling) is a social critic concerned with issues of sexism and racism.

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• If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, have recognition for difference without attaching difference to privilege.

• In a culture of domination, preoccupation with victimage is inevitable.

• As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.

• Since our society continues to be primarily a "Christian" culture masses of people continue to believe that god has ordained that women be subordinate to men in the domestic household.

• I still think it's important for people to have a sharp, ongoing critique of marriage in patriarchal society -- because once you marry within a society that remains patriarchal, no matter how alternative you want to be within your unit, there is still a culture outside you that will impose many, many values on you whether you want them to or not.

• The overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance.

Adventure is worthwhile in itself.

Amelia Earhart

Neruda.....still
 

Here I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
and the moon swam back,
its rays all silvered,
and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning. ”
― Pablo Neruda


Katniss---

So many people
Advised me against you;
How glad I am
We could not resist.


(found on a poetry banner while riding the Train)

"You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you,"

-- Mary Tyler Moore

Diving Into The Wreck

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
....
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

-- Adrienne Rich (1972)

"cosmic oceans

raise your head to the sky

you know we are alive

one burst, and we are breathing, breathing...

drop down your anchor dear

you know we are not lost

the sea it makes us free, free..."

-- Lyrics from Sun Glitters
by Cosmic Oceans (Ft. Steffaloo).

The Brave

Fear can defeat love only if the love lacks faith.
Love, accompanied by faith, is insurmountable.
It is inevitable, most irresistible and certainly not for the faint of heart.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
Steve Jobs

Marilyn French (1929 - )
 

Marilyn French is the author of The Women's Room (), a 1970s feminist landmark novel that drew much criticism for giving women little hope of achieving happiness in relationships with men; Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals, a book of essays; The War against Women, amd a three-volume women's history overview, From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women.

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• Feminism isn't a question of what kind of genitals you possess, it's a kind of moral view. It's what you think with your head and feel with your heart.

• (Feminism defined): the belief that women matter as much as men do.

• My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of western civilization, to make it a feminist world.

• Women are afraid in a world in which almost half the population bears the guise of the predator, in which no factor -- age, dress, or color-distinguishes a man who will harm a woman from one who will not.

Serenade
Written by Pablo Neruda

With my hand I gather in this emptiness,
the bewildering night, the starry families
a chorus still more silent than the silence,
a moon sound, something secret, a triangle,
a chalked geometry.
It is the night of the ocean, a third solitude,
a quivering which opens doors and wings.
The mysterious and intangible population
trembles and washes over the names of the estuary.

Night, the sea’s name, homeland, roots, rose!




Katniss