Quote

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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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
Energy
Definitions
Openly
Power
Forth
Selves
Back
Parts
Imposed
Without
Available
Freely
Externally
Self
Flow
Sources
Integrate
Different
Source
Concentration
Integrating
Particular
Allowing
Fullest
Living
Definition
Restriction

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I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.
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Once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy.
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Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.
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I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
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The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference. . . .
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You'd better name yourself, because, if you don't others will do it for you.
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Out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that knows comes the shape I am seeking for reason.
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We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.
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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.
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We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.
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We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we've done it.
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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.
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So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.
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Art is not living. It is the use of living. The artist has the ability to take the living and use it in a certain way and produce art.
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It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
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