Selected Quotes on Coming Home

...Your silence will not protect you... What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make you own, until you sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. ...because I am myself -- a Black woman warrior poet doing my work -- come to ask you, are you doing yours?

~ Audre Lorde in Sister Outsider

Who says it's easy? But we have the power.
The word is not fear,
the word we live.
But an old word suddenly made new,
As we learn it again, as we bring it alive:

Love. Love. Love. Love.

~ May Sarton

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.

~ Audre Lorde

On occasion
a mushroom will shoulder
through asphalt.
Like an occassional blade of grass
casts aside a slab of stone and rises --
not unlike the stories of Jesus.

And it is every bit as good a story
and worth celebrating,
even though they never heard of Jesus
and are only doing what the living do
when moving towards the light,
against desperate odds.

~ Claudio Mauro

...But my daughter... said, "Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there is always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside."

~ Audre Lorde in Sister Outsider

Coming Home Quotes; maintained by Chris Paige; https://www.angelfire.com/on/otherwise/home.html

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