“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Context: 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.
Context: 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.
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Audre Lorde 72
writer and activist 1934–1992Related quotes
Love's Voice (c.1935–1939)
"Poetry is Not a Luxury"
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
“Name is a fence and within it you are nameless.”
Samuli Paronen, quoted in: M.kumar. Dictionary of Quotations, APH Publishing, 2008. p. 168
Source: Tao Te Ching, Ch. 1, as translated by J.H.McDonald (1996) http://www.wright-house.com/religions/taoism/tao-te-ching.html [Public domain translation]
Context: The tao that can be described
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be spoken
is not the eternal Name.
The nameless is the boundary of Heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of creation.
Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery.
By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real.
Yet mystery and reality
emerge from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
Darkness born from darkness.
The beginning of all understanding.
"Poetry is Not a Luxury"
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
¶ 6-7.
An Humble, Earnest and Affectionate Address to the Clergy (1761)
Context: All possible goodness that either can be named, or is nameless, was in God from all eternity, and must to all eternity be inseparable from him; it can be nowhere but where God is. As therefore before God created anything, it was certainly true that there was but one that was good, so it is just the same truth, after God has created innumerable hosts of blessed and holy and heavenly beings, that there is but one that is good, and that is God.
All that can be called goodness, holiness, divine tempers, heavenly affections, in the creatures, are no more their own, or the growth of their created powers, than they were their own before they were created. But all that is called divine goodness and virtue in the creature is nothing else, but the one goodness of God manifesting a birth and discovery of itself in the creature, according as its created nature is fitted to receive it. This is the unalterable state between God and the creature. Goodness for ever and ever can only belong to God, as essential to him and inseparable from him, as his own unity.
Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
“They say that nameless things change constantly—that names fix them in place like pins.”
Source: Ironside