Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
Interpretation
Pride can be both empowering and harmful, influencing our emotions and actions in complex ways.
Adrienne Rich's quote suggests that pride is a complex emotion that can elevate us and instill a sense of glory, but it also has the potential to lead to negative consequences if mismanaged. Recognizing pride as a 'double-edged' feeling indicates that while it can motivate and inspire, it can also cloud judgment and create obstacles in relationships and self-perception.
In practice
In a speech about personal growth, one might say, 'As Adrienne Rich notes, pride can be a tricky emotion that we must navigate carefully.'
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!'
In the chapel you prayed to be a saint and now I will make you a god.
...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.
Holiness has nothing to do with what we know and everything to do with Who we know.
Cruelty to animals is one of the most significant vices of a low and ignoble people. Wherever one notices them, they constitute a sign of ignorance and brutality which cannot be painted over even by all the evidence of wealth and luxury.
The only thing that really matters is that there be an action of goodness, love and intelligence in living. Is goodness individual or collective, is love personal or impersonal, is intelligence yours, mine or somebody else? If it is yours or mine then it is not intelligence, or love, or goodness. If goodness is an affair of the individual or of the collective, according to one's particular preference or decision, then it is no longer goodness.
I am a freak in secondhand velour, a leper who uses L'Oreal Anti-sticky Mega Gel. I am rootless, ripped from all foundations, an orphan raising an orphan and wanting to take away everything there is and replace it with stuff I've made.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.