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Audre Lorde Quotes

Audre Lorde was an American writer, feminist, womanist, librarian, and civil rights activist. As a poet, she is best known for technical mastery and emotional expression, as well as her poems that express anger and outrage at civil and social injustices she observed throughout her life. Her poems and prose largely deal with issues related to civil rights, feminism, lesbianism, illness and disability, and the exploration of black female identity.

In relation to non-intersectional feminism in the United States, Lorde famously said, "those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support." Wikipedia  

✵ 18. February 1934 – 17. November 1992
Audre Lorde photo

Works

The Cancer Journals
Sister Outsider
Sister Outsider
Audre Lorde
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
Audre Lorde: 72 quotes65 likes

Famous Audre Lorde Quotes

“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”

Audre Lorde book The Cancer Journals

The Cancer Journals, Special Edition, Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, CA, 1997, p. 13.

“Your silence will not protect you.”

Audre Lorde

essay "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action", in Sister Outsider
Source: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“We must be the change we wish to see in the world.”

Audre Lorde

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

Audre Lorde

Source: Our Dead Behind Us: Poems

“Without community, there is no liberation.”

Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde Quotes about feelings

“For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, “Beautiful and tough as chestnut/stanchions against our nightmare of weakness” and of impotence. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.”

Audre Lorde

"Poetry is Not a Luxury"
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

“We recognize that all knowledge is mediated through the body and that feeling is a profound source of information about our lives”

Audre Lorde

“Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.”

Audre Lorde

“The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.”

Audre Lorde

Source: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984), p. 38

“I soon discovered that if you keep your mouth shut, people are apt to believe you know everything, and they begin to feel freer and freer to tell you anything, anxious to show that they know something, too.”

Audre Lorde

“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”

Audre Lorde

"Poetry is Not a Luxury"
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

Audre Lorde: Trending quotes

“Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom.”

Audre Lorde

"Poetry is Not a Luxury"
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Context: The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet-whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom.

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

Audre Lorde

essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House", in Sister Outsider

Audre Lorde Quotes

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

Audre Lorde

(1981) Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”

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

Audre Lorde

Source: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive”

Audre Lorde

Source: The Black Unicorn: Poems

“I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side”

Audre Lorde

“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.”

Audre Lorde

“Revolution is not a one time event.”

Audre Lorde

Source: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”

Audre Lorde

“… oppression is as American as apple pie…”

Audre Lorde

“The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.”

Audre Lorde

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

Audre Lorde

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.”

Audre Lorde

essay "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action", in Sister Outsider

“I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.”

Audre Lorde

Source: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

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

Audre Lorde

“Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose
the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution,
but more usually
we must do battle where we are standing.”

Audre Lorde

Source: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care.”

Audre Lorde

“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”

Audre Lorde

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Context: Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
Context: For women, then, 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 external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

“Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.”

Audre Lorde

“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence.”

Audre Lorde

Source: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“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.”

Audre Lorde

“Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.”

Audre Lorde

Source: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”

Audre Lorde

“We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.”

Audre Lorde

“What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?”

Audre Lorde book The Cancer Journals

Source: The Cancer Journals

“Without community, there is no liberation… but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”

Audre Lorde

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

Audre Lorde

Source: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“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.”

Audre Lorde

essay "Eye to Eye", in Sister Outsider

“I cried to think of how lucky we both were to have found each other, since it was clear that we were the only ones in the world who could understand what we understood in the instantaneous manner in which we understood it.”

Audre Lorde book Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

Source: Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“You cannot, 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.”

Audre Lorde

“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.”

Audre Lorde

Source: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Learning not to crumple before these uncertainties fuels my resolve to print myself upon the texture of each day fully rather than forever.”

Audre Lorde

“There is a timbre of voice
that comes from not being heard
and knowing / you are not being
heard / noticed only
by others / not heard
for the same reason.”

Audre Lorde

Source: The Collected Poems

“When patriarchy dismisses us, it encourages our murderers.”

Audre Lorde book Sister Outsider

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face? What woman's terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?”

Audre Lorde

"The Uses of Anger"
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

“I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or chisel to remind you of your me-ness as I discover you in myself.”

Audre Lorde

essay "Eye to Eye", in Sister Outsider

“When I speak of the erotic, then I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.”

Audre Lorde

entry for June 26 Living Life Fully in Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much, Anne Wilson Schaef, c. 1990

“We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

Audre Lorde

"Poetry is Not a Luxury"
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

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