Audre Lorde: Trending quotes

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

“… and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.”

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

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

“… oppression is as American as apple pie…”

“Your silence will not protect you.”

“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.”

“I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”

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

“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”

“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.”

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

“Revolution is not a one time event.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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”