Say what you have to say now! Don't wait until you're sending blips from the other side.
Interpretation
Express your thoughts and feelings openly and immediately, without delay.
Audre Lorde's quote emphasizes the importance of communicating authentically and without hesitation. It suggests that waiting too long to express oneself can lead to missed opportunities and regrets, urging individuals to speak their truth while they still can.
In practice
In a motivational speech about seizing opportunities.
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
I do know the sorrow of being ordinary, and that much of our life is spent doing the crazy mental arithmetic of how, at any given moment, we might improve, or at least disguise or present our defects and screw-ups in either more charming or more intimidating ways.
I was blind and heart broken and didn't want to do anything and Gus burst into my room and shouted, "I have wonderful news!" And I was like, "I don't really want to hear wonderful news right now," and Gus said, "This is wonderful news you want to hear," and I asked him, "Fine, what is it?" and he said, "You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet!
As life becomes harder and more threatening, it also becomes richer, because the fewer expectations we have, the more good things of life become unexpected gifts that we accept with gratitude.
...You can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.
I'm incapable of describing the feeling with which I left. I wouldn't want it ever to be repeated, but I would have considered myself unfortunate if I'd never experienced it.
Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.
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