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I soon discovered that if you keep your mouth shut, people are apt to believe you know everything, and they begin to feel freer and freer to tell you anything, anxious to show that they know something, too.

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
Feels
Begin
Something
Show
Freer
Believe
Tell
Anxious
People
Keep
Shut
Shows
Discovered
Anything
Mouth
Everything
Mouths
Feel
Soon

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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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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The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.
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When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.
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But, on the other hand, I get bored with racism too and recognize that there are still many things to be said about a Black person and a White person loving each other in a racist society.
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There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
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Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care.
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Perhaps...I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am a lesbian, because I am myself--a Black woman warrior poet doing my work--come to ask you, are you doing yours?
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Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
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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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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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Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.
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Whenever a conscious Black woman raises her voice on issues central to her existence, somebody is going to call her strident, because they don't want to hear about it, nor us. I refuse to be silenced and I refuse to be trivialized, even if I do not say what I have to say perfectly.
Audre Lorde
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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
Audre Lorde
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I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.
Audre Lorde
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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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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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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.
Audre Lorde
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In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.
Audre Lorde
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Out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that knows comes the shape I am seeking for reason.
Audre Lorde
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Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare.
Audre Lorde