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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?

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
Work
Poet
Perhaps
Asks
Face
Faces
Woman
Lesbian
Black
Warrior
Come
Fears

More quotes by 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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Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized.
Audre Lorde
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To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society
Audre Lorde
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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.
Audre Lorde
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Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
Audre Lorde
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Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
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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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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Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
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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I was going to die, if not sooner, then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.
Audre Lorde
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And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
Audre Lorde
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Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.
Audre Lorde
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I am very, very happy for Alice Walker.
Audre Lorde
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What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face?
Audre Lorde
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You'd better name yourself, because, if you don't others will do it for you.
Audre Lorde
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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
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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.
Audre Lorde
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Divide and conquer must become define and empower.
Audre Lorde
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There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
Audre Lorde