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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
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
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.
Audre Lorde
The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference. . . .
Audre Lorde
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
If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.
Audre Lorde
I learned to read from Mrs. Augusta Baker, the children's librarian. ... If that was the only good deed that lady ever did in her life, may she rest in peace. Because that deed saved my life, if not sooner, then later, when sometimes the only thing I had to hold on to was knowing I could read.
Audre Lorde
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.
Audre Lorde
Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
Audre Lorde
Art is not living. It is the use of living.
Audre Lorde
Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.
Audre Lorde
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
It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we'll make it.
Audre Lorde
If you do not learn to hate you will never be lonely enough to love easily nor will you always be brave, although it does not grow any easier. Do not pretend to convenient beliefs, even when they are righteous you will never be able to defend your city while shouting.
Audre Lorde
As we come to know, accept, and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas-the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.
Audre Lorde
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
We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.
Audre Lorde
When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.
Audre Lorde
I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do.
Audre Lorde
Some words live in my throat breeding like adders. Others know sun seeking like gypsies over my tongue to explode through my lips
Audre Lorde
Our visions begin with our desires.
Audre Lorde
