Audre Lorde

The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.

Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.

The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

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.

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.

I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.

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.

I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too?

But, on the other hand, I get bored with racism too and recognize that there are still many things to be said about a Black person and a White person loving each other in a racist society.

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.

Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away.