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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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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
Misnamed
Tolerated
Recognized
Well

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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Your silence will not protect you.
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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I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.
Audre Lorde
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We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.
Audre Lorde
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Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.
Audre Lorde
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But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.
Audre Lorde
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When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.
Audre Lorde
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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. . . .
Audre Lorde
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Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.
Audre Lorde
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There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
Audre Lorde
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I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.
Audre Lorde
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When you are a member of an out-group, and you challenge others with whom you share this outsider position to examine some aspect of their lives that distorts differences between you, then there can be a great deal of pain.
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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What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?
Audre Lorde
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Without community, there is no liberation.
Audre Lorde
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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
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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.
Audre Lorde
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For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.
Audre Lorde
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My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restriction of externally imposed definition.
Audre Lorde
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I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast.
Audre Lorde