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The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.

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
Poetry
Difference
Instead
Ready
Differences
Children
Rhetoric
Kill
Poet

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We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.
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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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I would like to do another piece of fiction dealing with a number of issues: Lesbian parenting, the 1960's, and interracial relationships in the Lesbian and Gay community.
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Hatred is a death wish for the hated, not a life wish for anything else.
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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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I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
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Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded.
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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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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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Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.
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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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As we come to know, accept, and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas-the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.
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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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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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For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection, which is so feared by a patriarchal world.
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So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.
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I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.
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You will never be able to defend your city while shouting.
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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 a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.
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