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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.

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
Dies
Words
Fear
Sicken
Stills
Tyrannies
Still
Swallow
Need
Attempt
Needs
Tyranny
Make
Silence

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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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It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
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My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restriction of externally imposed definition.
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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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Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
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We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we've done it.
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When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
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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.
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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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Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded.
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And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
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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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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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I train myself for triumph by knowing it is mine no matter what.
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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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Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge. They are chaotic, sometimes painful, sometimes contradictory, but they come from deep within us. And we must key into those feelings... This is how new visions begin.
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I stand here as a black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism and homophobia are inseparable. . . .
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There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
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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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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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