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Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.

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
Learning
Keep
Live
Afloat
Contradictions
Contradiction
Harmony
Inspiring

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.
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I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast.
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I am very, very happy for Alice Walker.
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For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, beautiful and tough as chestnut stanchions against our nightmare of weakness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling
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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.
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So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.
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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.
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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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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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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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I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.
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What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face?
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The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.
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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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Some words live in my throat breeding like adders. Others know sun seeking like gypsies over my tongue to explode through my lips
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There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
Audre Lorde
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Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
Audre Lorde
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I would like to do another piece of fiction dealing with a number of issues: Lesbian parenting, the 1960's, and interracial relationships in the Lesbian and Gay community.
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The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
Audre Lorde