Audre Lorde Quotes & Sayings

If this society ascribes roles to Black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it Black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing? — Audre Lorde

We are all in the process of becoming. — Audre Lorde

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order for us to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness. — Audre Lorde

You can not take down the master's house with the master's tools
Audre Lorde — Audre Lorde

Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever. — Audre Lorde

Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows "that is not me." In america, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially secure. It is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society. Those of us who stand outside that power often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be practicing. — Audre Lorde

It is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. — Audre Lorde

The fear of death is that you are dying too soon. Nobody wants to, but at the point that you die you can pray that you are no longer the same person. I pray that when I am about to die I will not be the same person that I am now. — Audre Lorde

I feel, therefore I can be free. — Audre Lorde

It is not the destiny of Black America to repeat white America's mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life. — Audre Lorde

Poetry is not a luxury. — Audre Lorde

Places do not change so much as what we seek in them — Audre Lorde

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. — Audre Lorde

One thing has always kept me going - and it's not really courage or bravery, unless that's what courage or bravery is made of - is that sense that there are so many ways in which I'm vulnerable and cannot help but be vulnerable, I'm not going to be more vulnerable by putting weapons of silence in my enemies' hands. Being an open lesbian in the Black community is not easy, although being closeted is even harder. — Audre Lorde

I wish to raise a Black man who will not be destroyed by, nor settle for, those corruptions called power by the white fathers who mean his destruction as surely as they mean mine. I wish to raise a Black man who will recognize that the legitimate objects of his hostility are not women, but the particulars of a structure that programs him to fear and despise women as well as his own Black self. — Audre Lorde

It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again. — Audre Lorde

For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices. — Audre Lorde

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. — Audre Lorde

In the 60s, political correctness became not a guideline for living, but a new set of shackles. A small and vocal part of the Black community lost sight of the fact that unity does not mean unanimity - Black people are not some standardly digestible quantity. In order to work together we do not have to become a mix of indistinguishable particles resembling a vat of homogenized chocolate milk. — Audre Lorde

The breakdown of mummies and daddies was an important part of lesbian relationships in the Bagatelle ... For some of us, however, role-playing reflected all the depreciating attitudes toward women which we loathed in straight society. It was the rejection of these roles that had drawn us to 'the life' in the first place. Instinctively, without particular theory or political position or dialectic, we recognized oppression as oppression, no matter where it came from.
But those lesbians who had carved some niche in the pretend world of dominance/subordination rejected what they called our 'confused' lifestyle, and they were in the majority. — Audre Lorde

This kind of action is a prevalent error among oppressed peoples. It is based upon the false notion that there is only a limited and particular amount of freedom that must be divided up between us, with the largest and juiciest pieces of liberty going as spoils to the victor or the stronger. So instead of joining together to fight for more, we quarrel between ourselves for a larger slice of the one pie. Black women fight between ourselves over men, instead of pursuing and using who we are and our strengths for lasting change; Black women and men fight between ourselves over who has more of a right to freedom, instead of seeing each other's struggles as part of our own and vital to our common goals; Black and white women fight between ourselves over who is the more oppressed, instead of seeing those areas in which our causes are the same. (Of course, this last separation is worsened by the intransigent racism that white women too often fail to, or cannot, address in themselves.) — Audre Lorde

Afraid is a country with no exit visas ... — Audre Lorde

When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry. — Audre Lorde

There are many kinds of open ... Love is a word, another kind of open ... Take my word for jewel in your open light. — Audre Lorde

Without community, there is no liberation. — Audre Lorde

Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded ... — Audre Lorde

Your silence will not protect you. — Audre Lorde

I am a reflection of my mother's secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers — Audre Lorde

In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair. — Audre Lorde

Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly "inferior" capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear. — Audre Lorde

As a living creature I am part of two kinds of forces- growth and decay, sprouting and withering, living and dying- and at any given moment of our lives, each one of us is actively located somewhere along a continuum between these two forces. — Audre Lorde

Art is not living. It is a use of living. The artist has the ability to take that living and use it in a certain way, and produce art. — Audre Lorde

The more I use my strength in the service of my vision the less I am afraid ... — Audre Lorde

As a Black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend everybody's comfortable prejudices of who I should be. — Audre Lorde

Dark-bright fire lit eyes — Audre Lorde

Learning not to crumple before these uncertainties fuels my resolve to print myself upon the texture of each day fully rather than forever. — Audre Lorde

The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival. — Audre Lorde

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. — Audre Lorde

Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does. — Audre Lorde

What you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority — Audre Lorde

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. — Audre Lorde

Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation. — Audre Lorde

The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions. — Audre Lorde

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. — Audre Lorde

Black Lesbians are not a threat to the Black family. Many of us have families of our own. We are not white, and we are not a disease. We are women who love women. This does not mean we are going to assault your daughters in an alley on Nostrand Avenue. It does not mean we only think about sex, any more than you only think about sex. Even if you do believe any of these stereotypes about Black Lesbians, begin to practice acting like you don't believe them. — Audre Lorde

Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action. — Audre Lorde

The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children. — Audre Lorde

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. — Audre Lorde

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 — Audre Lorde

I am my best work - a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines. — Audre Lorde

What do we want from each other
after we have told our stories — Audre Lorde

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 throught the rain. — Audre Lorde

When you are a member of an out-group, and you challenge others with whom you share this outsider position to examine some aspect of their lives that distorts differences between you, then there can be a great deal of pain. — Audre Lorde

As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become "other," the outsider whose experience and tradition is too "alien" to comprehend. — Audre Lorde

All of our children are prey. How do we raise them not to prey upon themselves and each other? And this is why we cannot be silent, because our silences will come to testify against us out of the mouths of our children. — Audre Lorde

Some of our finest writers, organizers, artists, and scholars in the 60s as well as today, have been lesbian and gay, and history will bear me out. — Audre Lorde

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. — Audre Lorde

I would like to do another piece of fiction dealing with a number of issues: Lesbian parenting, the 1960's, and interracial relationships in the Lesbian and Gay community. — Audre Lorde

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. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling — Audre Lorde

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

As we come to know, accept, and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas-the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. — Audre Lorde

Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures. — Audre Lorde

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. — Audre Lorde

We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding. We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not lie to ourselves. We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about - survival and growth. — Audre Lorde

You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. but people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that poin was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret of not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving.
It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched. — Audre Lorde

Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged ... We have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression ... Survival is learning to take our difference and make them strengths. — Audre Lorde

I know certainly, for instance, it's part of the black aesthetic, the whole concept of art as business, art for art's sake, art as the competitive gesture, I connect with a very male-oriented concept of living, as opposed to, and we would call them alternate aesthetics, which include the black aesthetic, the feminist aesthetic, where art and poetry become part and parcel of one's daily living, one's daily expression, the need to communicate, the need to share one's feelings, to develop within oneself the best that is possible. And the definition of art as betterment, I think, is a mainstay of the alternative aesthetics. — Audre Lorde

We cannot love 'our people' unless we love each of us ourselves, unless I love each piece of myself, those I wish to keep and those I wish to change - for survival is the ability to encompass difference, to encompass change without destruction. — Audre Lorde

When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I'm not excluding you from the joining - I'm broadening the joining. — Audre Lorde

I am not just a lesbian. I am not just a poet. I am not just a mother. Honor the complexity of your vision and yourselves. — Audre Lorde

When there is no connection at all between people, then anger is a way of bringing them closer together, of making contact. But when there is a great deal of connectedness that is problematic or threatening or unacknowledged, then anger is a way of keeping people separate, of putting distance between us. — Audre Lorde

As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom from oppression, 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 this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live. — Audre Lorde

We recognize that all knowledge is mediated through the body and that feeling is a profound source of information about our lives — Audre Lorde

Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness. — Audre Lorde

Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer. — Audre Lorde

Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future. — Audre Lorde

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 horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. — Audre Lorde

To search for power within myself means I must be willing to move through being afraid to whatever lies beyond. If I look at my most vulnerable places and acknowledge the pain I have felt, I can remove the source of that pain from my enemies' arsenals. My history cannot be used to feather my enemies' arrows then, and that lessens their power over me. Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself. — Audre Lorde

I do not want to be tolerated, or misnamed. I want to be recognized. — Audre Lorde

One shard of brilliant summer pierced me
and remains.
By this only
unregenerate bone
I am not dead, but waiting. — Audre Lorde

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. — Audre Lorde

Who I am is what fulfills me and fulfills the vision I have of the world. — Audre Lorde

How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live
unblinded?
How much of this pain
can I use? — Audre Lorde

When patriarchy dismisses us, it encourages our murderers. — Audre Lorde

Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me-so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins. — Audre Lorde

I write for these 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 will save us, but it won't. — Audre Lorde

I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior. — Audre Lorde

One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness. — Audre Lorde

Say what you have to say now! Don't wait until you're sending blips from the other side. — Audre Lorde

The supposition that one sex needs the other's acquiescence in order to exist prevents both from moving together as self-defined persons toward a common goal. — Audre Lorde

I am a post-mastectomy woman who believes our feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and of use. — Audre Lorde

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. — Audre Lorde

Silence and invisibility go hand in hand with powerlessness ... — Audre Lorde

I seek no favor untouched by blood. — Audre Lorde

When times are hard, do something. If it works, do it some more. If it does not work, do something else. But keep going. — Audre Lorde

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. — Audre Lorde

These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that 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. — Audre Lorde

Revolution is not a one time event. — Audre Lorde

We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love. — Audre Lorde

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. — Audre Lorde