Audre Lorde

From the self-described 'black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet', these soaring, urgent essays on the power of women, poetry and anger are filled with darkness and light. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

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

taylor miles hopkins

We are making the future as well as bonding to survive the enormous pressures of the present, and that is what it means to be a part of history.

 I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience…

For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt…

…the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which canbe the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

…to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance.

And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.

Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretence that these differences do not exist.

In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge.

to remember this when you are accused of destruction.)

The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House quotes

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