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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

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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
Defined
Use
Others
Axiomatic
Detriment
Define

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Out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that knows comes the shape I am seeking for reason.
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When I speak of the erotic, then I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.
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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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To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society
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Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized.
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The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
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I train myself for triumph by knowing it is mine no matter what.
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Without community, there is no liberation.
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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.
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It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
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Every woman I have ever known has made a lasting impression on my soul.
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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.
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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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All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing.
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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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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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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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Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge. They are chaotic, sometimes painful, sometimes contradictory, but they come from deep within us. And we must key into those feelings... This is how new visions begin.
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Poetry is not a luxury.
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But, on the other hand, I get bored with racism too and recognize that there are still many things to be said about a Black person and a White person loving each other in a racist society.
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