Audre Lorde: Trending quotes (page 2)

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”