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I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.

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
Believe
Indulgent
Caring
Survival
Come
Self

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We have too often been expected to speak all things to all people and speak everyone else's position but our own.
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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.
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The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
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Whenever a conscious Black woman raises her voice on issues central to her existence, somebody is going to call her strident, because they don't want to hear about it, nor us. I refuse to be silenced and I refuse to be trivialized, even if I do not say what I have to say perfectly.
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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.
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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.
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There are lesbians, God knows... if you came up through lesbian circles in the forties and fifties in New York... who were not feminist and would not call themselves feminists.
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The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
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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.
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The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
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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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I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast.
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It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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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Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
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Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.
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You are the one that you are looking for.
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