Quote

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.

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
Speak
Fundamental
Way
Fundamentals
Tantalizing
Think
Tend
Arousal
Thinking
Toward
Kinky
Life
Force
Erotic
Moving
Deepest
Living
Moves
Easy
Sexual

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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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Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
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Divide and conquer must become define and empower.
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Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.
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It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
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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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I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
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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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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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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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What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face?
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The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
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We have too often been expected to speak all things to all people and speak everyone else's position but our own.
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One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.
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What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?
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We are powerful because we have survived
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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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