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I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness as well as my womaness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable.

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
Well
Fronts
Inseparable
Mean
Therefore
Struggles
Struggle
Primaries
Results
Primary
Black
Oppression
Power
Feminist
Wells
Recognize
Oppressions
Come
Result
Blackness

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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Once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy.
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We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.
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I stand here as a black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism and homophobia are inseparable. . . .
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Out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that knows comes the shape I am seeking for reason.
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The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.
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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?
Audre Lorde
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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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You'd better name yourself, because, if you don't others will do it for you.
Audre Lorde
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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.
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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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I am very, very happy for Alice Walker.
Audre Lorde
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We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.
Audre Lorde
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Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.
Audre Lorde
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There are lesbians, God knows... if you came up through lesbian circles in the forties and fifties in New York... who were not feminist and would not call themselves feminists.
Audre Lorde
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There are no honest poems about dead women.
Audre Lorde
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Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
Audre Lorde
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Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.
Audre Lorde
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For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection, which is so feared by a patriarchal world.
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You know how fighting fish do it? They blow bubbles and in each one of those bubbles is an egg and they float the egg up to the surface. They keep this whole heavy nest of eggs floating, and they're constantly repairing it. It's as if they live in both elements.
Audre Lorde
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Art is not living. It is the use of living.
Audre Lorde