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AUDRE LORDEMy experience with people who tried to label me was that they usually did it to either dismiss me or use me.
More Audre Lorde Quotes
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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.
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The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
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Oppression is as American as apple pie.
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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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What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?
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Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
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I have died too many deaths that were not mine.
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The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations that we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us.
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You cannot use someone else’s fire. You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it.
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Anger is loaded with information and energy.
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But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.
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I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.
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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.
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Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us, wherever and however we are standing, in whatever arena we choose.
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Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
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For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.
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Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs.
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It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
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Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.
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My experience with people who tried to label me was that they usually did it to either dismiss me or use me.
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When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
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We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about survival and growth.
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Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity.
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I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
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Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.
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I am still learning – how to take joy in all the people I am, how to use all my selves in the service of what I believe, how to accept when I fail and rejoice when I succeed.
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