If you can't change reality, change your perceptions of it.
Interpretation
If you cannot alter the situation around you, adjust how you view it instead.
This quote by Audre Lorde emphasizes the power of perception in the face of unchangeable circumstances. It suggests that while we may not have control over external reality, we can choose how we interpret and react to it, thereby influencing our experience and emotional state.
In practice
During a motivational speech about resilience and mental health.
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.
The earth does not need new continents, but new men.
You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
Do one of three things. One, go find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start bombing - but this will only swing people to the right. Three, learn a lesson. Go home, organize, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegates.
When you lift up black women, you lift up entire communities and the entire country.
Fifteen years ago, if you said business will help save the environment people would have laughed at you. Today, I believe that is a serious proposition.
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