We have too often been expected to speak _x000D_ all things to all people and speak everyone else's position _x000D_ but our own.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the pressure to represent others' views while neglecting our own.
Audre Lorde's quote emphasizes the challenge individuals face in a society that often expects them to voice the opinions and experiences of others, sometimes at the expense of their own truths. It calls for a recognition of the importance of individual perspectives and the need to assert one's own voice in discussions that typically prioritize collective narratives over personal reality.
In practice
During a panel discussion on diversity, one might say this quote to emphasize the importance of personal representation.
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.
You are free, but you have to choose. An open oven bakes no bread
Be not ashamed of mistakes and thus make them crimes.
Waste is worse than loss. The time is coming when every person who lays claim to ability will keep the question of waste before him constantly. The scope of thrift is limitless.
How little people know who think that holiness is dull... When one meets the real thing, it's irresistible!
If any successes has come to me, it came because I insisted on thinking things through. That's all I was capable of doing in life, was thinking pretty hard about trying to get the right answer, and then acting on it. I never learned to do anything else.
When you're on your own, you have all the self-censorship that everybody has when they try and write. All the little voices that say, 'No, you can't write that, what will they think of that?'
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