Life & Wisdom Quote by Adrienne Rich

Pride, in Adrienne Rich's hands, is never the cheap confidence of a motivational poster. It's an emotion with a blade on both sides: it can fortify the self, and it can cut the self off. Calling it "tricky" signals suspicion of pride as a stable virtue. It slips between self-respect and self-deception, between survival and status. "Glorious" complicates that suspicion. Rich refuses the puritan reflex that treats pride as sin; she grants it radiance, even necessity, especially for people trained by family, nation, and gender to be small.

The phrase "double-edged" does quiet political work. Rich wrote through decades when feminist and queer self-assertion had to be invented against ridicule and punishment. Pride, in that context, is not mere vanity; it's a counter-institution, a way to name one's life as worth defending. But the second edge remains: pride can calcify into purity tests, hierarchy, a brittle identity that can't tolerate doubt. Rich's poetry repeatedly worries at how liberation movements can reproduce the very dominance they oppose, how the hunger to be seen can turn into the demand to be obeyed.

The line works because it compresses a whole ethics into a tactile metaphor. You can feel the weapon in your hand. Rich doesn't tell you to abandon pride or embrace it; she insists you handle it carefully, with awareness of what it protects and what it might wound.