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Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare.

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
Next
Happens
Littles
Little
Push
Time
Dare
Worst
Happen
Asks

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
Audre Lorde
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Divide and conquer must become define and empower.
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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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Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.
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If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness we give up the future of our worlds. (From Poetry is Not a Luxury)
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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.
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Your silence will not protect you.
Audre Lorde
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The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our own oppression as women.
Audre Lorde
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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.
Audre Lorde
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We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we've done it.
Audre Lorde
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Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.
Audre Lorde
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We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.
Audre Lorde
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I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
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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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.
Audre Lorde
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The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
Audre Lorde
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There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
Audre Lorde
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In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.
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.
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. 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