Quote

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

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded.
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We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we've done it.
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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 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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I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
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For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, beautiful and tough as chestnut stanchions against our nightmare of weakness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling
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Whenever a conscious Black woman raises her voice on issues central to her existence, somebody is going to call her strident, because they don't want to hear about it, nor us. I refuse to be silenced and I refuse to be trivialized, even if I do not say what I have to say perfectly.
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And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.
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Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
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What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?
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Art is not living. It is the use of living. The artist has the ability to take the living and use it in a certain way and produce art.
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You are the one that you are looking for.
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I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
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Every woman I have ever known has made a lasting impression on my soul.
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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. And in order to survive they must let go. This is what mothers teach — love, survival — that is, self-definition and letting go.
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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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From my membership in all of these groups I have learned that oppression and the intolerance of difference come in all shapes and sizes and colors and sexualities and that among those of us who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of oppression.
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We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.
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We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.
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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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