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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.

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
Evade
Succumb
Transcend
Deal
Deals
Pain
Important

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I am very, very happy for Alice Walker.
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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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Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.
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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.
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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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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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Art is not living. It is the use of living.
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Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
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I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.
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There are no honest poems about dead women.
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Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare.
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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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Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized.
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Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.
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Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
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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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I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.
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Hatred is a death wish for the hated, not a life wish for anything else.
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I know the anger lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other.
Audre Lorde
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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.
Audre Lorde