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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.

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
Risk
Inspirational
Bruised
Come
Verbal
Must
Misunderstood
Important
Spoken
Even
Shared
Made
Acceptance
Believe
Silence

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Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare.
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There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
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Poetry is not a luxury.
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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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One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.
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I stand here as a black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism and homophobia are inseparable. . . .
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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.
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We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.
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We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we've done it.
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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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Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.
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To face the realities of our lives is not a reason for despair-despair is a tool of your enemies. Facing the realities of our lives gives us motivation for action. For you are not powerless... You know why the hard questions must be asked. It is not altruism, it is self-preservation-survival.
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Out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that knows comes the shape I am seeking for reason.
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It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we'll make it.
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It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
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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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As we come to know, accept, and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas-the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.
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The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation.
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I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.
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Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.
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