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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.

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
Become
Lessons
Empowering
Firsts
Reach
Academic
First
Failure
Crucial
Must
Difference
Lesson
Patriarchal
World
Beyond
Define
Feminists
Strength
Conquer
Empower
Differences
Feminist
Divide
Literature
Recognize
Divides

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Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.
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The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference. . . .
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When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
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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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Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized.
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Without community, there is no liberation.
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You are the one that you are looking for.
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Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.
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Women are powerful and dangerous.
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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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When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.
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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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We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.
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Poetry is not a luxury.
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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 know the anger lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other.
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I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
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