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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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Others

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face?
Audre Lorde
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Art is not living. It is the use of living.
Audre Lorde
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The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.
Audre Lorde
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Once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy.
Audre Lorde
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We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.
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
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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
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Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized.
Audre Lorde
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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.
Audre Lorde
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So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.
Audre Lorde
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Perhaps...I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am a lesbian, because I am myself--a Black woman warrior poet doing my work--come to ask you, are you doing yours?
Audre Lorde
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Say what you have to say now! Don't wait until you're sending blips from the other side.
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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If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness we give up the future of our worlds. (From Poetry is Not a Luxury)
Audre Lorde
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The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
Audre Lorde
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We are powerful because we have survived
Audre Lorde
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In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.
Audre Lorde
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Our visions begin with our desires.
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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We have too often been expected to speak all things to all people and speak everyone else's position but our own.
Audre Lorde