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When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

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
Use
Becoming
Encouragement
Fear
Becomes
Feminist
Black
Vision
Dare
Business
Successful
Service
Inspirational
Powerful
Importance
Power
Whether
Afraid
Women
Less
Courage
Encouraging
Important
Success
Strength
Daring

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.
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Women are powerful and dangerous.
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The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.
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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.
Audre Lorde
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I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.
Audre Lorde
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I learned to read from Mrs. Augusta Baker, the children's librarian. ... If that was the only good deed that lady ever did in her life, may she rest in peace. Because that deed saved my life, if not sooner, then later, when sometimes the only thing I had to hold on to was knowing I could read.
Audre Lorde
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The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our own oppression as women.
Audre Lorde
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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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I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.
Audre Lorde
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When I speak of the erotic, then I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.
Audre Lorde
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What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?
Audre Lorde
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Raising Black children — female and male — in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive. And in order to survive they must let go. This is what mothers teach — love, survival — that is, self-definition and letting go.
Audre Lorde
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Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.
Audre Lorde
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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.
Audre Lorde
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Hatred is a death wish for the hated, not a life wish for anything else.
Audre Lorde
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I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.
Audre Lorde
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The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. . . .
Audre Lorde
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Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
Audre Lorde
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Without community, there is no liberation.
Audre Lorde
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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.
Audre Lorde