audre lorde is my hero

Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.  And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.  Audre Lorde

growing

Darkness was a presence.  I learned to see in it, I learned to see through it, and I learned to see the darkness of my own.  - Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

hells yeah

Patriarchy and capitalism are not autonomous, not even interconnected systems, but the same system.  

- Pat Armstrong and Hugh Armstrong

take the time

When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual's.  But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense.  For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense.  For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society.  Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.  - Audre Lorde