Audre Lorde citations

“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”

“Without community, there is no liberation.”

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

“Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.”

“Your silence will not protect you.”

“and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive”

“… and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.”

“I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side”

“The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.”

“Revolution is not a one time event.”

“I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”

“… oppression is as American as apple pie…”

“We must be the change we wish to see in the world.”

“The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.”

“to that piece in each of us that refuses to be silent.”

“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.”

“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”

“Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom.”

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.”

“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.”