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

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?
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Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
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And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
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We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.
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Women are powerful and dangerous.
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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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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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Say what you have to say now! Don't wait until you're sending blips from the other side.
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Divide and conquer must become define and empower.
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Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.
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The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation.
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It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.
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... it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.
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If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest.
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Art is not living. It is the use of living.
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Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.
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I soon discovered that if you keep your mouth shut, people are apt to believe you know everything, and they begin to feel freer and freer to tell you anything, anxious to show that they know something, too.
Audre Lorde
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Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
Audre Lorde
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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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If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.
Audre Lorde