Quote

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.

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
Mother
Hills
Doe
Parts
Earth
Mountain
Peaks
Body
Share
Incorporate
Wanted
Within
Richest
Upon
Valleys
Way
Woman
Mountains
Always
Father
Strongest
Men

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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Women are powerful and dangerous.
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We are powerful because we have survived
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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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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. . . .
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In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.
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Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare.
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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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What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?
Audre Lorde
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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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I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
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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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Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.
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.
Audre Lorde
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Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideasl The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves--along with the renewed courage to try them out.
Audre Lorde
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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.
Audre Lorde
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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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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.
Audre Lorde
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Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
Audre Lorde
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Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized.
Audre Lorde
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To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society
Audre Lorde