O interview (2003)
Context: Yes, I'm beautiful … I am beautiful and famous — and yet the things I like about myself have nothing to do with that, because I don't use wealth and beauty to define myself. People think I'm more beautiful than I am because they see me on magazine covers — but go to nearly any town, and you'd find prettier women. And though I'm well known now, I might not be famous one day —but I'd still be happy. I do have money, but I could be richer. I just don't want to pay the price some are willing to pay to have more money. I live in a small house. I'm not the glamour girl who wears makeup every day. I live a wonderful life, and I lack for nothing. Maybe that does make it easier for me to say, "Be who you are" — but I always tell people they shouldn't be too impressed with wealth and fame. They shouldn't worship it. I am in this machine, but I haven't completely given my soul to it.
“When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I'm not excluding you from the joining - I'm broadening the joining.”
Source: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
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Audre Lorde 72
writer and activist 1934–1992Related quotes
Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 46
“I'm in first place. I said when you're in first place, you discuss polls.”
2010s, 2016, January, Speech at (18 January 2016)
Source: Little Altars Everywhere
First address as Vice-President, widely reported as having been delivered while he was inebriated. (5 March 1865).
Quote
“Maybe I don't want to be defined by what I do. Maybe I'd like to be defined by what I am.”
Katie, Chapter 29, p. 236
Variant: Maybe I’d like to
be defined by what I am.
Source: 2009, Safe Haven (2010)
“I still define myself by the places that I've been.”
North Main Street
Song lyrics
Two-Bit Manchild
Song lyrics, Velvet Gloves and Spit (1968)