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There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.

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
Ideas
Way
Ways
Making
Felt

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.
Audre Lorde
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... it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.
Audre Lorde
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The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
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 sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.
Audre Lorde
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We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.
Audre Lorde
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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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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.
Audre Lorde
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Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.
Audre Lorde
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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.
Audre Lorde
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Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
Audre Lorde
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I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.
Audre Lorde
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To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society
Audre Lorde
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When you are a member of an out-group, and you challenge others with whom you share this outsider position to examine some aspect of their lives that distorts differences between you, then there can be a great deal of pain.
Audre Lorde
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I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
Audre Lorde
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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. . . .
Audre Lorde
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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.
Audre Lorde
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The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
Audre Lorde
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How a diamond comes into a knot of flame How a sound comes into a word, coloured By who pays what for speaking. Some words are open. Love is a word another kind of open — As a diamond comes into a knot of flame I am black because I come from the earth's inside. Take my word for jewel in your open light.
Audre Lorde
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I soon discovered that if you keep your mouth shut, people are apt to believe you know everything, and they begin to feel freer and freer to tell you anything, anxious to show that they know something, too.
Audre Lorde