When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
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.
We are all in the process of becoming.
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.
Without community, there is no liberation.
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
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 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.
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
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.
Divide and conquer must become define and empower.
It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those other identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make the strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
The speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.
Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded.
When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.
For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we've done it.
If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.
You are the one that you are looking for.
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.
Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.
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.
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