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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.

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
Expected
Position
Everyone
Often
Speak
Else
Things
People

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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Divide and conquer must become define and empower.
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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.
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I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.
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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.
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What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?
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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.
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The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.
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The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
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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.
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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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Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.
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I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.
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I am very, very happy for Alice Walker.
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You are the one that you are looking for.
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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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We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.
Audre Lorde
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The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
Audre Lorde
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When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
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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
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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