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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
Would
Lesbian
Forty
Circles
Feminist
York
Forties
Came
Lesbians
Literature
Fifties
Call
Feminists

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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I believe one of the hardest things you can do is conquer your fears, but if you have a goal, then it's your job to open up and let it be real no matter how scary it seems.
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Every woman I have ever known has made a lasting impression on my soul.
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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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Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.
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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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We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.
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It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.
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The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
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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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I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.
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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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If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness we give up the future of our worlds. (From Poetry is Not a Luxury)
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I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.
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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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Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
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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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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.
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I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
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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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The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference. . . .
Audre Lorde