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Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.

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
Profit
Difference
Institutionalized
Differences
Surplus
Economy
Outsiders
Needs
Rejection
People
Necessity
Absolutes
Absolute

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Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.
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For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection, which is so feared by a patriarchal world.
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I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.
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It is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others-for their use and to our detriment.
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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.
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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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Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.
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Poetry is not a luxury.
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We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.
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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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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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Without community, there is no liberation.
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Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.
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In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.
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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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What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?
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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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Say what you have to say now! Don't wait until you're sending blips from the other side.
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You will never be able to defend your city while shouting.
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The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
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