As we get in touch with the things that we feel are intolerable, in our lives, they become more and more intolerable. If we just once dealt with how much we hate most of what we do, there would be no holding us back from changing it. This is true with any kind of movement. This is the way in which the philosopher/Queen, the poet-warrior leads.
“
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Audre Lorde (interview with Karla Hammond)
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We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.
“
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Audre Lorde
i love this quotation, but i hate that most people quote it without the entire context, leaving the last, very important part out. she was speaking specifically about Black women, but people truncate the quotation to fit their agendas—not realizing that without the ending, they are reinforcing all of the reasons she wrote this in the first place.
(via itsvisceral)
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Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.
The difference between poetry
and rhetoric
is being
ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children
When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid. So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.
Your silence will not protect you.
“
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Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (via left-nut)
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”The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom.”
—Audre Lorde
It is so much easier to remain emotionally aloof or to indulge in the quick emotional jerk-off that passes as sentiment so often.
I knew what it was like to be haunted by the ghost of a self one wished to be, but only half-sensed.
“
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Audre Lorde (from Zami: A New Spelling of My Name)
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