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Institutionalized Rejection Of Differences Is An Absolute Necessity In A Profit Economy Which Needs Outsiders As Surplus People. As Members Of Such An Economy, We Have All Been Programmed To Respond To The Human Differences Between Us With Fear And Loathing And To Handle That Difference In One Of Three Ways: Ignore It, And If That Is Not Possible, Copy It If We Think It Is Dominant, Or Destroy It If We Think It Is Subordinate.

-Audre Lorde

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Institutionalized Rejection Of Differences

Audre Lorde

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Institutionalized Rejection Of Differences Is An Absolute Necessity In A Profit Economy Which Needs Outsiders As Surplus People. As Members Of Such An Economy, We Have All Been Programmed To Respond To The Human Differences Between Us With Fear And Loathing And To Handle That Difference In One Of Three Ways: Ignore It, And If That Is Not Possible, Copy It If We Think It Is Dominant, Or Destroy It If We Think It Is Subordinate.

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Attend Me, Hold Me In Your Muscular Flowering Arms, Protect Me From Throwing Any Part Of Myself Away.

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For Within Livin Structures Defined By Profit, By Linear Power, By Institutional Dehumanization, Our Feelings Were Not Meant To Survive. Kept Around As Unavoidable Adjuncts Or Pleasant Pastimes, Our Feelings Were Expected To Kneel To Thought As Women Were Expected To Kneel To Men. But Women Have Survived. As Poets.

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I Can't Really Define It In Sexual Terms Alone Although Our Sexuality Is So Energizing Why Not Enjoy It Too?

I Write For Those Women Who Do Not Speak, For Those Who Do Not Have A Voice Because They Were So Terrified, Because We Are Taught To Respect Fear More Than Ourselves. We've Been Taught That Silence Would Save Us, But It Won't.

If I Didn't Define Myself For Myself, I Would Be Crunched Into Other People's Fantasies For Me And Eaten Alive.

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We Cannot Settle For The Pretenses Of Connection, Or For The Parodies Of Self-love.

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Differences Must Be Not Merely Tolerated, But Seen As A Fund Of Necessary Polarities Between Which Our Creativity Can Spark Like A Dialectic.

We Must Wake Up Knowing We Have Work To Do And Go To Bed Knowing We've Done It.

Of All The Art Forms, Poetry Is The Most Economical. It Is The One Which Is The Most Secret, Which Requires The Least Physical Labor, The Least Material, And The One Which Can Be Done Between Shifts, In The Hospital Pantry, On The Subway, And On Scraps Of Surplus Paper. ... Poetry Has Been The Major Voice Of Poor, Working Class, And Colored Women. A Room Of One's Own May Be A Necessity For Writing Prose, But So Are Reams Of Paper, A Typewriter, And Plenty Of Time.

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What Do We Want From Each Other After We Have Told Our Stories

And This Is A Grave Responsibility, Projected From Within Each Of Us, Not To Settle For The Convenient, The Shoddy, The Conventionally Expected, Nor The Merely Safe.

The Oppression Of Women Knows No Ethnic Nor Racial Boundaries, True, But That Does Not Mean It Is Identical Within Those Boundaries.

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Art Is Not Living. It Is The Use Of Living.

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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.

And When The Sun Rises We Are Afraid It Might Not Remain When The Sun Sets We Are Afraid It Might Not Rise In The Morning When Our Stomachs Are Full We Are Afraid Of Indigestion When Our Stomachs Are Empty We Are Afraid We May Never Eat Again When We Are Loved We Are Afraid Love Will Vanish When We Are Alone We Are Afraid Love Will Never Return And 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

Every Woman I Have Ever Known Has Made A Lasting Impression On My Soul.

Lasting Impressions

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.

Black And Third World People Are Expected To Educate White People As To Our Humanity. Women Are Expected To Educate Men. Lesbians And Gay Men Are Expected To Educate The Heterosexual World. The Oppressors Maintain Their Position And Evade Their Responsibility For Their Own Actions. There Is A Constant Drain Of Energy Which Might Be Better Used In Redefining Ourselves And Devising Realistic Scenarios For Altering The Present And Constructing The Future.

I Started Writing Because I Had A Need Inside Of Me To Create Something That Was Not There

I Am A Black Feminist. I Mean I Recognize That My Power As Well As My Primary Oppressions Come As A Result Of My Blackness As Well As My Womaness, And Therefore My Struggles On Both Of These Fronts Are Inseparable.

The Erotic Has Often Been Misnamed By Men And Used Against Women. It Has Been Made Into The Confused, The Trivial, The Psychotic, The Plasticized Sensation.

All Writers Have Periods When They Stop Writing, When They Cannot Write, And This Is Always Painful And Terrible Because Writing Is Like Breathing.

I Am On The Cusp Of Change And The Curve Is Shifting Fast.

I Am A Bleak Heroism Of Words That Refuse To Be Buried Alive With The Liars.

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")

And Where The Words Of Women Are Crying To Be Heard, We Must Each Of Us Recognize Our Responsibility To Seek Those Words Out, To Read Them And Share Them And Examine Them In Their Pertinence To Our Lives.

The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House.

You Loved People And You Came To Depend On Their Being There. But People Died Or Changed Or Went Away And It Hurt Too Much. The Only Way To Avoid That Poin Was Not To Love Anyone, And Not To Let Anyone Get Too Close Or Too Important. The Secret Of Not Being Hurt Like This Again, I Decided, Was Never Depending On Anyone, Never Needing, Never Loving.it Is The Last Dream Of Children, To Be Forever Untouched.

Out Of My Flesh That Hungers And My Mouth That Knows Comes The Shape I Am Seeking For Reason.

It Does Not Pay To Cherish Symbols When The Substance Lies So Close At Hand.

Some Problems We Share As Women, Some We Do Not. You [white Women] Fear Your Children Will Grow Up To Join The Patriarchy And Testify Against You; We Fear Our Children Will Be Dragged From A Car And Shot Down In The Street, And You Will Turn Your Backs On The Reasons They Are Dying.

There Are No New Ideas. There Are Only New Ways Of Making Them Felt.

Tomorrow Belongs To Those Of Us Who Conceive Of It As Belonging To Everyone; Who Lend The Best Of Ourselves To It, And With Joy.

Black Women Sharing Close Ties With Each Other, Politically Or Emotionally, Are Not The Enemies Of Black Men.

Nothing I Accept About Myself Can Be Used Against Me To Diminish Me.

I Want To Live The Rest Of My Life, However Long Or Short, With As Much Sweetness As I Can Decently Manage, Loving All The People I Love, And Doing As Much As I Can Of The Work I Still Have To Do.

My Fear Of Anger Taught Me Nothing.

There Is A Timbre Of Voice That Comes From Not Being Heard And Knowing / You Are Not Being Heard / Noticed Only By Others / Not Heard For The Same Reason.

Those Of Us Who Stand Outside The Circle Of This Society's Definition Of Acceptable Women; Those Of Us Who Have Been Forged In The Crucibles Of Difference - Those Of Us Who Are Poor, Who Are Lesbians, Who Are Black, Who Are Older - Know That Survival Is Not An Academic Skill...for The Master's Tools Will Not Dismantle The Master's House. They Will Never Allow Us To Bring About Genuine Change.

What I Leave Behind Has A Life Of Its Own.

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Mayer Hawthorne

Cathy Guisewite

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