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But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.

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
Sleep
Literature
Lesbianism
Whether
Sleeps
True
Lesbian
Women
Feminist
Ever
Motivational
Deals
Consciousness

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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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Whenever a conscious Black woman raises her voice on issues central to her existence, somebody is going to call her strident, because they don't want to hear about it, nor us. I refuse to be silenced and I refuse to be trivialized, even if I do not say what I have to say perfectly.
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It is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others-for their use and to our detriment.
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Women are powerful and dangerous.
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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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You know how fighting fish do it? They blow bubbles and in each one of those bubbles is an egg and they float the egg up to the surface. They keep this whole heavy nest of eggs floating, and they're constantly repairing it. It's as if they live in both elements.
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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.
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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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The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
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Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
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It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
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Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
Audre Lorde
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And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.
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The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.
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One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.
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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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The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself.
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Every woman I have ever known has made a lasting impression on my soul.
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From my membership in all of these groups I have learned that oppression and the intolerance of difference come in all shapes and sizes and colors and sexualities and that among those of us who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of oppression.
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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