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If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.
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
Change
Oppressions
Anything
Directed
Enough
External
Oppression
Conditions
Taught
History
Action
More quotes by Audre Lorde
We are powerful because we have survived
Audre Lorde
It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
Audre Lorde
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
Audre Lorde
Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.
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
Some words live in my throat breeding like adders. Others know sun seeking like gypsies over my tongue to explode through my lips
Audre Lorde
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.
Audre Lorde
Say what you have to say now! Don't wait until you're sending blips from the other side.
Audre Lorde
. . . 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.
Audre Lorde
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.
Audre Lorde
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.
Audre Lorde
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.
Audre Lorde
One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.
Audre Lorde
... it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.
Audre Lorde
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
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
Audre Lorde
You are the one that you are looking for.
Audre Lorde
Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare.
Audre Lorde
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.
Audre Lorde
Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.
Audre Lorde