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.
Interpretation
Women are often constrained by societal expectations, and supporting each other can help reveal their true potential.
Adrienne Rich highlights the impact of cultural narratives that restrict women's ambitions and perceptions of their capabilities. She emphasizes the importance of empowering one another by shining a light on the possibilities available to women, encouraging a collective recognition of strength and potential that may be overshadowed by societal limitations.
In practice
In a women's leadership workshop, to encourage participants to push boundaries.
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.
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.
A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'β
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
It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
If I'd observed all the rules, I'd never have got anywhere.
Don't wait until you feel positive to move forward. Act your way into feeling good.
If you're looking where everybody else is looking, you're looking in the wrong spot.
The key is not the will to win... everybody has that. It is the will to prepare to win that is important.
You have got to want to be the best before you can even begin to reach for that goal, and you have got to be prepared to sacrifice a lot to get there.
The chances of a person breaking through their own habits and sloth and limited mind to actually write something that gets out there and matters to people are slim.
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