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You'd better name yourself, because, if you don't others will do it for you.

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
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More quotes by Audre Lorde

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... it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.
Audre Lorde
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The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference. . . .
Audre Lorde
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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
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Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare.
Audre Lorde
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pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.
Audre Lorde
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Art is not living. It is the use of living.
Audre Lorde
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Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideasl The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves--along with the renewed courage to try them out.
Audre Lorde
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Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
Audre Lorde
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Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.
Audre Lorde
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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.
Audre Lorde
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You are the one that you are looking for.
Audre Lorde
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Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.
Audre Lorde
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Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
Audre Lorde
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It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.
Audre Lorde
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When you are a member of an out-group, and you challenge others with whom you share this outsider position to examine some aspect of their lives that distorts differences between you, then there can be a great deal of pain.
Audre Lorde
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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.
Audre Lorde
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The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation.
Audre Lorde
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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.
Audre Lorde
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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
Audre Lorde
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The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change.
Audre Lorde