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We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.

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
Dissatisfaction
Gratitude
Blind

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest.
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Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.
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We have too often been expected to speak all things to all people and speak everyone else's position but our own.
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The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.
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Without community, there is no liberation.
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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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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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Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
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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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I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side
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My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restriction of externally imposed definition.
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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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Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized.
Audre Lorde
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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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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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There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
Audre Lorde
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Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded.
Audre Lorde
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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.
Audre Lorde
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Poetry is not a luxury.
Audre Lorde
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Our visions begin with our desires.
Audre Lorde