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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.

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
Whether
Doesn
Therapy
Touch
Human
Reach
Humans
Beings
Matter
Poetry
Teaching
Call

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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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I learned to read from Mrs. Augusta Baker, the children's librarian. ... If that was the only good deed that lady ever did in her life, may she rest in peace. Because that deed saved my life, if not sooner, then later, when sometimes the only thing I had to hold on to was knowing I could read.
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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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. . . it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are-until the poem-nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.
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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.
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I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
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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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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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Poetry is not a luxury.
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I train myself for triumph by knowing it is mine no matter what.
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I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.
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Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.
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Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded.
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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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Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
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I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.
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Without community, there is no liberation.
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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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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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The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
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