Quote

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.

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
Attention
Males
Interest
Racism
Common
Interests
Rather
Recognize
Upon
Competition
Programmed
Moving
Move
Compete
Black
Literature
Define
Women
Within
Male

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One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.
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It is not the destiny of Black America to repeat white America's mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life.
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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.
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Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
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For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection, which is so feared by a patriarchal world.
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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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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. . . .
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You will never be able to defend your city while shouting.
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My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restriction of externally imposed definition.
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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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I train myself for triumph by knowing it is mine no matter what.
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Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
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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.
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To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society
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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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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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Your silence will not protect you.
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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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Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.
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