Audre Lorde
Overview
Audre Lorde was a Caribbean-American writer, poet and activist.
Lorde was born in New York City to Caribbean immigrants from Grenada, Frederick Byron Lorde (called Byron) and Linda Gertrude Belmar Lorde, who settled in Harlem
Harlem
Harlem is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, which since the 1920s has been a major African-American residential, cultural and business center. Originally a Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, it is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands...

. Nearsighted
Myopia
Myopia , "shortsightedness" ) is a refractive defect of the eye in which collimated light produces image focus in front of the retina under conditions of accommodation. In simpler terms, myopia is a condition of the eye where the light that comes in does not directly focus on the retina but in...

 to the point of being legally blind, and the youngest of three daughters (her sisters named Phyllis and Helen), Lorde grew up hearing her mother's stories about the West Indies
Caribbean
The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...

.
Quotations

When I speak of the erotic, then I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

entry for June 26 Living Life Fully in Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much, Anne Wilson Schaef, c. 1990

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.

The Cancer Journals, Special Edition, Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, CA, 1997, p. 13.

Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever / Only, nothing is eternal.

Undersong

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. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.

essay "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action", in Sister Outsider

Your silence will not protect you.

essay "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action", in Sister Outsider

I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or chisel or remind you of your me-ness as I discover you in myself.

essay "Eye to Eye", in Sister Outsider

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.

essay "Eye to Eye", in Sister Outsider

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House", in Sister Outsider

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.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

 
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