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Audre Lorde: 144 quotes65 likes

“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?”

"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.”

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.”

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.”

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

“I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me — to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.”

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever / Only, nothing is eternal.”

Undersong

“My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I’m going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity.”

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

“Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

“Overextending myself is not stretching myself. I had to accept how difficult it is to monitor the difference. Necessary for me as cutting down on sugar. Crucial. Physically. Psychically. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Source: [Lorde, Audre, A Burst of Light : Living with Cancer, A burst of light : essays, 125, Firebrand Books, 1988, 0932379400]