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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
Accept
Accepting
Used
Nothing
Diminish

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
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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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To face the realities of our lives is not a reason for despair-despair is a tool of your enemies. Facing the realities of our lives gives us motivation for action. For you are not powerless... You know why the hard questions must be asked. It is not altruism, it is self-preservation-survival.
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Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
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Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.
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Women are powerful and dangerous.
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Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
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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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The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
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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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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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The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change.
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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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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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I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.
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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.
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To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society
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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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One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.
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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.
Audre Lorde