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. . . it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are-until the poem-nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.

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
Giving
Poem
Poetry
Already
Name
Names
Felt
Birthed
Give
Formless
Ideas
Nameless

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I believe one of the hardest things you can do is conquer your fears, but if you have a goal, then it's your job to open up and let it be real no matter how scary it seems.
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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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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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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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You'd better name yourself, because, if you don't others will do it for you.
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Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized.
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I train myself for triumph by knowing it is mine no matter what.
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The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference. . . .
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I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast.
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Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.
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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
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Divide and conquer must become define and empower.
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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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Guilt is not a response to anger it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action.
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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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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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There are no honest poems about dead women.
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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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It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
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Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.
Audre Lorde