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Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.

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
Machines
Whether
Speak
Trying
Grind
Machine
Anyway
Dust

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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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Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
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Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded.
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It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we'll make it.
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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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When you are a member of an out-group, and you challenge others with whom you share this outsider position to examine some aspect of their lives that distorts differences between you, then there can be a great deal of pain.
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Art is not living. It is the use of living.
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How a diamond comes into a knot of flame How a sound comes into a word, coloured By who pays what for speaking. Some words are open. Love is a word another kind of open — As a diamond comes into a knot of flame I am black because I come from the earth's inside. Take my word for jewel in your open light.
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You are the one that you are looking for.
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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.
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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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Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
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The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
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Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.
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One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.
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Art is not living. It is the use of living. The artist has the ability to take the living and use it in a certain way and produce art.
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I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.
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Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
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To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society
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If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest.
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