Audre Lorde Quotes

And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.

It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

My fear of anger taught me nothing.

When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.

Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare.

There is no Hierarchy of Oppressions

How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live unblinded? How much of this pain can I use?

The more I use my strength in the service of my vision the less I am afraid.

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged... We have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression... Survival is learning to take our difference and make them strengths.

Our visions begin with our desires.

[Speaking] is never without fear; of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now, that if I were to have been born mute, and had maintained an oath of silence my whole life for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die.

Who I am is what fulfills me and fulfills the vision I have of the world.

Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideasl The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves--along with the renewed courage to try them out.

If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.

Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.

Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself.

I have suckled the wolf's lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter.

You know how fighting fish do it? They blow bubbles and in each one of those bubbles is an egg and they float the egg up to the surface. They keep this whole heavy nest of eggs floating, and they're constantly repairing it. It's as if they live in both elements.

I learned to read from Mrs. Augusta Baker, the children's librarian. ... If that was the only good deed that lady ever did in her life, may she rest in peace. Because that deed saved my life, if not sooner, then later, when sometimes the only thing I had to hold on to was knowing I could read.

Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.

stoicism and silence does not serve us nor our communities, only the forces of things as they are.

I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.

You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. but people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that poin was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret of not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving.It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched.

Poetry is not a luxury.

We must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply and so many of our old ideas disparage.

I started writing because I had a need inside of me to create something that was not there

I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

... poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

to that piece in each of us that refuses to be silent.

I have died too many deaths that were not mine.

Say what you have to say now! Don't wait until you're sending blips from the other side.

I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too?

The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself.

Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer.

We are powerful because we have survived

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.

Divide and conquer must become define and empower.

Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us, wherever and however we are standing, in whatever arena we choose.

Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.

I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me - to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.

You cannot use someone else's fire. You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it.

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. ... poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one's own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time.

What I leave behind has a life of its own.

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.

Anger is loaded with information and energy.