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To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society

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
Encouraged
Mediocrity
Encourage
Excellence
Beyond
Society

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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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
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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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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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. . . it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are-until the poem-nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.
Audre Lorde
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Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge. They are chaotic, sometimes painful, sometimes contradictory, but they come from deep within us. And we must key into those feelings... This is how new visions begin.
Audre Lorde
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You are the one that you are looking for.
Audre Lorde
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What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence.
Audre Lorde
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Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.
Audre Lorde
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pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.
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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Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.
Audre Lorde
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I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.
Audre Lorde
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But, on the other hand, I get bored with racism too and recognize that there are still many things to be said about a Black person and a White person loving each other in a racist society.
Audre Lorde
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Guilt is not a response to anger it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action.
Audre Lorde
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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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Say what you have to say now! Don't wait until you're sending blips from the other side.
Audre Lorde
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The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.
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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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)
Audre Lorde
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So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.
Audre Lorde