Audre Lorde: Feel

Audre Lorde was writer and activist. Explore interesting quotes on feel.

Audre Lorde: 144 quotes65 likes

“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.”

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

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

“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”

“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.”

“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.”

Source: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984), p. 38

“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.”

"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”

“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)

“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)