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One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.
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
Pays
Awareness
Pay
More quotes by Audre Lorde
Our visions begin with our desires.
Audre Lorde
Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.
Audre Lorde
It is not the destiny of Black America to repeat white America's mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life.
Audre Lorde
Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.
Audre Lorde
Hatred is a death wish for the hated, not a life wish for anything else.
Audre Lorde
Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care.
Audre Lorde
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
Audre Lorde
Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized.
Audre Lorde
Women are powerful and dangerous.
Audre Lorde
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.
Audre Lorde
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.
Audre Lorde
In discussions around the hiring and firing of Black faculty at universities, the charge is frequently heard that Black women are more easily hired than are Black men.
Audre Lorde
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.
Audre Lorde
Perhaps...I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am a lesbian, because I am myself--a Black woman warrior poet doing my work--come to ask you, are you doing yours?
Audre Lorde
When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.
Audre Lorde
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
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.
Audre Lorde
Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.
Audre Lorde
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
Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
Audre Lorde