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

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.
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Our visions begin with our desires.
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Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.
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It is not the destiny of Black America to repeat white America's mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life.
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We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.
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You'd better name yourself, because, if you don't others will do it for you.
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Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge. They are chaotic, sometimes painful, sometimes contradictory, but they come from deep within us. And we must key into those feelings... This is how new visions begin.
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Divide and conquer must become define and empower.
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If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness we give up the future of our worlds. (From Poetry is Not a Luxury)
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I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side
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I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
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There are lesbians, God knows... if you came up through lesbian circles in the forties and fifties in New York... who were not feminist and would not call themselves feminists.
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Say what you have to say now! Don't wait until you're sending blips from the other side.
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There are no honest poems about dead women.
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Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.
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Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care.
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For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.
Audre Lorde
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There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
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Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
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We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.
Audre Lorde