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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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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
Responsibility
Convenient
Within
Settle
Settling
Grave
Graves
Expected
Shoddy
Merely
Conventionally
Safe
Projected

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When you are a member of an out-group, and you challenge others with whom you share this outsider position to examine some aspect of their lives that distorts differences between you, then there can be a great deal of pain.
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The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
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All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing.
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It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
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The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.
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Divide and conquer must become define and empower.
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I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast.
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We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.
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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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But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.
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There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
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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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The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation.
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I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.
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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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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.
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Our visions begin with our desires.
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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.
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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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The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. . . .
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