It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we'll make it.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of resilience and knowledge transfer for collective survival and progress.
Audre Lorde's quote suggests that individual experiences can serve as powerful metaphors for broader societal issues. By advocating for resilience and the sharing of knowledge, she highlights the potential for groups—be they people, races, or genders—to thrive through adversity if they persist and educate one another.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges in a community setting.
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.
How easy it is to see your brother's faults, How hard it is to face your own.
When you're full of yourself, God can't fill you. But when you empty yourself, God has a useful vessel.
Solve all your problems through meditation. Exchange unprofitable religious speculations for actual God-contact. Clear your mind of dogmatic theological debris; let in the fresh, healing waters of direct perception. Attune yourself to the active inner Guidance; the Divine Voice has the answer to every dilemma of life. Through man's ingenuity for getting himself into trouble appears to be endless, the Infinite Succor is no less resourceful.
What is required is sight and insight- then you might add one more: excite.
Advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.
Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially if this dependency is a dependency of our self-esteem. If you need encouragement, praise, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge.
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