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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
Fantasy
Inspiring
Personality
Alive
Crunched
Literature
Fantasies
Didn
Eaten
Would
Define
People
Diversity

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Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
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Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.
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When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.
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Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.
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What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?
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The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
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I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.
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We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.
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It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.
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Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
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What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence.
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Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.
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Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
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The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
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From my membership in all of these groups I have learned that oppression and the intolerance of difference come in all shapes and sizes and colors and sexualities and that among those of us who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of oppression.
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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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Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.
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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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