Audre Lorde Quotes

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

“Your silence will not protect you.”

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

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

“Without community, there is no liberation.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”

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

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

“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”

“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”

“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.”

“Revolution is not a one time event.”

“I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”

“… oppression is as American as apple pie…”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”

“Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.”

“I am my best work - a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.”

“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.”

“But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.”

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

“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.”

“We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.”

“The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.”

“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.”

“If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they probably will not survive.”

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

“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.”

“I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs.”

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

“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.”

“what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority”

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

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”