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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.

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
Female
Resist
Probably
Racist
Chancy
Justice
Male
Perilous
Black
Males
Sexist
Cannot
Survive
Dragon
Children
Mouth
Suicidal
Time
Diversity
Dragons
Love
Mouths
Raising

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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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The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
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You will never be able to defend your city while shouting.
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The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
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I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.
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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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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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As we come to know, accept, and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas-the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.
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I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side
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Some words live in my throat breeding like adders. Others know sun seeking like gypsies over my tongue to explode through my lips
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But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.
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I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.
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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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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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I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
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There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
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Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.
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I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do.
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All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing.
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