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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.
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
Vision
Chaotic
Path
Contradictory
Within
Paths
Knowledge
Genuine
Feelings
Painful
Come
Keys
Sometimes
Begin
Must
Deep
Visions
More quotes by Audre Lorde
The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
Audre Lorde
It is not the destiny of Black America to repeat white America's mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life.
Audre Lorde
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. And in order to survive they must let go. This is what mothers teach — love, survival — that is, self-definition and letting go.
Audre Lorde
When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.
Audre Lorde
Guilt is not a response to anger it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action.
Audre Lorde
We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.
Audre Lorde
If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.
Audre Lorde
Out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that knows comes the shape I am seeking for reason.
Audre Lorde
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.
Audre Lorde
In discussions around the hiring and firing of Black faculty at universities, the charge is frequently heard that Black women are more easily hired than are Black men.
Audre Lorde
Hatred is a death wish for the hated, not a life wish for anything else.
Audre Lorde
Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized.
Audre Lorde
The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. . . .
Audre Lorde
What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?
Audre Lorde
Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
Audre Lorde
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
Audre Lorde
What I leave behind has a life of its own.
Audre Lorde
The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
Audre Lorde
I learned to read from Mrs. Augusta Baker, the children's librarian. ... If that was the only good deed that lady ever did in her life, may she rest in peace. Because that deed saved my life, if not sooner, then later, when sometimes the only thing I had to hold on to was knowing I could read.
Audre Lorde
We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we've done it.
Audre Lorde