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Audre Lorde Quotes
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Audre Lorde was an American writer, feminist, womanist, librarian, and civil rights activist. As a poet, she is best known for technical mastery and emotional expression, as well as her poems that express anger and outrage at civil and social injustices she observed throughout her life. Her poems and prose largely deal with issues related to civil rights, feminism, lesbianism, illness and disability, and the exploration of black female identity.

In relation to non-intersectional feminism in the United States, Lorde famously said, "those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support." Wikipedia  

✵ 18. February 1934 – 17. November 1992
Audre Lorde photo
Audre Lorde: 72   quotes 64   likes

Audre Lorde Quotes

“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.”

Audre Lorde

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

Way , Mountain , Parting

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

Audre Lorde

Undersong

love , Love , Time

“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.”

Audre Lorde

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

Pain , Anger

“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.”

Audre Lorde

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

Personality , Anger , Change

“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.”

Audre Lorde

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

Thinking , Dreams , Feeling , Freedom

“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.”

Audre Lorde

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

Light , Dreams , Help , Hope

“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.”

Audre Lorde

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