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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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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
Names
Hopes
Help
Fears
Cobbled
Lives
Daily
Farthest
Helping
Experiences
Carved
Thought
Rock
Horizons
Give
Rocks
Nameless
Giving
Poetry
Poems
Way
Name
Horizon

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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 believe one of the hardest things you can do is conquer your fears, but if you have a goal, then it's your job to open up and let it be real no matter how scary it seems.
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So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.
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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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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 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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Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
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Without community, there is no liberation.
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I soon discovered that if you keep your mouth shut, people are apt to believe you know everything, and they begin to feel freer and freer to tell you anything, anxious to show that they know something, too.
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When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.
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Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.
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The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our own oppression as women.
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In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.
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The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.
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Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare.
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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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Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.
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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.
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Divide and conquer must become define and empower.
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For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.
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