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Audre Lorde: 144 quotes65 likes

“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

“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

“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)

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

Audre Lorde

“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