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Audre Lorde -
Sister Outsider (1984)
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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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My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restriction of externally imposed definition.
Audre Lorde
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The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself.
Audre Lorde
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My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I'm going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity.
Audre Lorde
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The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those boundaries.
Audre Lorde
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How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live unblinded? How much of this pain can I use?
Audre Lorde
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Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.
Audre Lorde
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Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
Audre Lorde
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Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures.
Audre Lorde
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Hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else.
Audre Lorde
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I have suckled the wolf's lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter.
Audre Lorde
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Every Black woman in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers.
Audre Lorde
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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.
Audre Lorde
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When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I'm not excluding you from the joining - I'm broadening the joining.
Audre Lorde
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It is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.
Audre Lorde
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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.
Audre Lorde
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Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged... We have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression... Survival is learning to take our difference and make them strengths.
Audre Lorde
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The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
Audre Lorde
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We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.
Audre Lorde
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I cannot shut you out the way I shut the others out, so maybe I can destroy you. Must destroy you?
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Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.
Audre Lorde
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What you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority
Audre Lorde
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Our sons must become men – such men as we hope our daughters, born and unborn, will be pleased to live among. Our sons will not grow into women. Their way is more difficult than that of our daughters, for they must move away from us, without us. Hopefully ours have what they have learned from us, and a howness to forge into their own image.
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I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.
Audre Lorde
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Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.
Audre Lorde
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Audre Lorde
Creative Commons
Born:
February 18, 1934
Died:
November 17, 1992
(aged 58)
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