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If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

Audre Lorde

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Audre Lorde
Age: 58 †
Born: 1934
Born: February 18
Died: 1992
Died: November 17
Essayist
Feminist
Librarian
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Audre Geraldine Lorde
Personality
Alive
Crunched
Literature
Fantasies
Didn
Eaten
Would
Define
People
Diversity
Fantasy
Inspiring

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The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
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I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness as well as my womaness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable.
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Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.
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Art is not living. It is the use of living. The artist has the ability to take the living and use it in a certain way and produce art.
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The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change.
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What I leave behind has a life of its own.
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So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.
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When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.
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... it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.
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. . . it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are-until the poem-nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.
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To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society
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I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.
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I know the anger lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other.
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What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?
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For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection, which is so feared by a patriarchal world.
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Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.
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Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.
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There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
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It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
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I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
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