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There are lesbians, God knows... if you came up through lesbian circles in the forties and fifties in New York... who were not feminist and would not call themselves feminists.
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
York
Forties
Came
Lesbians
Literature
Fifties
Call
Feminists
Would
Lesbian
Forty
Circles
Feminist
More quotes by Audre Lorde
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.
Audre Lorde
If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.
Audre Lorde
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
I stand here as a black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism and homophobia are inseparable. . . .
Audre Lorde
You'd better name yourself, because, if you don't others will do it for you.
Audre Lorde
Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
Audre Lorde
pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.
Audre Lorde
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
Audre Lorde
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.
Audre Lorde
But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.
Audre Lorde
I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.
Audre Lorde
Guilt is not a response to anger it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action.
Audre Lorde
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.
Audre Lorde
I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.
Audre Lorde
Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
Audre Lorde
Say what you have to say now! Don't wait until you're sending blips from the other side.
Audre Lorde
Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.
Audre Lorde
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.
Audre Lorde
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.
Audre Lorde
So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.
Audre Lorde