The Best and Worst of Audre Lorde Quotes
Check out some awesome and not so awesome Audre Lorde quotes. This page has all the quotes by Audre Lorde you need to know.
When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.
Your silence will not protect you.
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Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
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.
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I am my best work – a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.
I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk through the rain.
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
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I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes–everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!
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.
Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.
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Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.
Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care.
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Our visions begin with our desires.
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
Art is not living. It is the use of living.
Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.
The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.
In other words, I would be giving in to a myth of sameness which I think can destroy us.
But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.
When I use my strength in the service of my vision it makes no difference whether or not I am afraid.
Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away.
I can’t really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too?
Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.
When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.
In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.
When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.
In discussions around the hiring and firing of Black faculty at universities, the charge is frequently heard that Black women are more easily hired than are Black men.
Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.
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.
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.
We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.
There are lesbians, God knows… if you came up through lesbian circles in the forties and fifties in New York… who were not feminist and would not call themselves feminists.
Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
But, on the other hand, I get bored with racism too and recognize that there are still many things to be said about a Black person and a White person loving each other in a racist society.
But the question is a matter of the survival and the teaching. That’s what our work comes down to. No matter where we key into it, it’s the same work, just different pieces of ourselves doing it.
The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.
It’s possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we’ll make it.
There’s always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself – whether it’s Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. – because that’s the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t.
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.
You know how fighting fish do it? They blow bubbles and in each one of those bubbles is an egg and they float the egg up to the surface. They keep this whole heavy nest of eggs floating, and they’re constantly repairing it. It’s as if they live in both elements.
Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
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Audre Lorde Speech at UCLA
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