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Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.

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
Used
Nothing
Diminish
Accept
Accepting

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.
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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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If you do not learn to hate you will never be lonely enough to love easily nor will you always be brave, although it does not grow any easier. Do not pretend to convenient beliefs, even when they are righteous you will never be able to defend your city while shouting.
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It is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others-for their use and to our detriment.
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I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.
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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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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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Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.
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Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
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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.
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If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.
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The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
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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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The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
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What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?
Audre Lorde
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The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
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What I leave behind has a life of its own.
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Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
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Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.
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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