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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.

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
Black
Racism
Felt
Gay
Feelings
Lonely
Light
Keys
Truth
Fine
Remember
Hell
Young
Feeling
Literature
Purely

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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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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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.
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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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Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.
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Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized.
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... it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.
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Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideasl The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves--along with the renewed courage to try them out.
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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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Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.
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Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare.
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I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
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Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.
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Your silence will not protect you.
Audre Lorde
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When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.
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I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness as well as my womaness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable.
Audre Lorde
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What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence.
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I was going to die, if not sooner, then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.
Audre Lorde
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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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We have too often been expected to speak all things to all people and speak everyone else's position but our own.
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Guilt is not a response to anger it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action.
Audre Lorde