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Raising Black children — female and male — in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive. And in order to survive they must let go. This is what mothers teach — love, survival — that is, self-definition and letting go.

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
Time
Probably
Racist
Chancy
Love
Teach
Letting
Perilous
Black
Definition
Sexist
Order
Male
Dragon
Cannot
Survive
Suicidal
Self
Mouth
Raising
Must
Survival
Resist
Children
Female
Mothers

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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.
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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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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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The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our own oppression as women.
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The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
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The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
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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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What I leave behind has a life of its own.
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For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.
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Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded.
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I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me - to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.
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You'd better name yourself, because, if you don't others will do it for you.
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We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.
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Art is not living. It is the use of living.
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But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.
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Our visions begin with our desires.
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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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... it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.
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What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?
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