Audre 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

There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. — Audre Lorde

If you don't define yourself for yourself then you will be crushed into other's fantasies of you and eaten alive — Audre Lorde

Love is a word, another kind of open.
As the diamond comes
into a knot of flame
I am Black
because I come from the earth's inside
take my word for jewel
in the open light. — Audre Lorde

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife. — 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

Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat. — Audre Lorde

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. — Audre Lorde

I started writing because I had a need inside of me to create something that was not there — Audre Lorde

Poetry is not a luxury. — Audre Lorde

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

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. — Audre Lorde

The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation . — 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

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

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. — Audre Lorde

And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe. — Audre Lorde

I have heard it said - usually behind my back - that Black Lesbians are not normal. But what is normal in this deranged society by which we are all trapped? I remember, and so do many of you, when being Black was considered not normal, when they talked about us in whispers, tried to paint us, lynch us, bleach us, ignore us, pretend we did not exist. We called that racism.
I have heard it said that Black Lesbians are a threat to the Black family. But when 50 percent of children born to Black women are born out of wedlock, and 30 percent of all Black families are headed by women without husbands, we need to broaden and redefine what we mean by family.
I have heard it said that Black Lesbians will mean the death of the race. Yet Black Lesbians bear children in exactly the same way other women bear children, and a Lesbian household is simply another kind of family. Ask my son and daughter. — Audre Lorde

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. it is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely toleration, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within the interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters — Audre Lorde

Part of the lesbian consciousness is an absolute recognition of the erotic within our lives and, taking that a step further, dealing with the erotic not only in sexual terms. — Audre Lorde

My experience with people who tried to label me was that they usually did it to either dismiss me or use me. — Audre Lorde

June Jordan once said something which is just wonderful. I'm paraphrasing her-that her function as a poet was to make revolution irresistible. Well o.k. that is the function of us all, as creative artists, to make the truth, as we see it irresistible. — 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

I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness as well as my womaness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable. — Audre Lorde

If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough. — 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

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

The move to render the presence of lesbians and gay men invisible in the intricate fabric of Black existence and survival is a move which contributes to fragmentation and weakness in the Black community. — Audre Lorde

When the desire for definition, self or otherwise, comes out of a desire for limitation rather than a desire for expansion, no true face can emerge. — Audre Lorde

I know the anger lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other. — Audre Lorde

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge. — Audre Lorde

We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created. — 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

Each of us is called upon to take a stand. So in these days ahead, as we examine ourselves and each other, our works, our fears, our differences, our sisterhood and survivals, I urge you to tackle what is most difficult for us all, self-scrutiny of our complacencies, the idea that since each of us believes she is on the side of right, she need not examine her position. — Audre Lorde

I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness. — Audre Lorde

Once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy. — 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

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

I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars. — Audre Lorde

I learned to read from Mrs. Augusta Baker, the children's librarian ... If that was the only good deed that lady ever did in her life, may she rest in peace. Because that deed saved my life, if not sooner, then later, when sometimes the only thing I had to hold on to was knowing I could read. — Audre Lorde

When I hear the deepest truths I speak coming out of my mouth sounding like my mother's, even remembering how I fought against her, I have to reassess both our relationship as well as the sources of my knowing. — Audre Lorde

I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees. — Audre Lorde

Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now. — 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

I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too? — 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

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

Revolution is not a one time event. — Audre Lorde

To go to bed and to wake up again day afte day besides a woman, to lie in bed with our arms around each other and drift in and out of sleep, to be with each other not as a quick stolen pleasure, nor as a wild treat but like sunlight, day after day in the regualr course of our lives. I was discovering all the ways that love creeps into life when two selves exist closely, when two women meet. — Audre Lorde

Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside. — Audre Lorde

We have too often been expected to speak
all things to all people and speak everyone else's position
but our own. — 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

There is no such thing as a single issue struggle because we do not lead single issue lives. — Audre Lorde

Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. — Audre Lorde

He pondered that a little while and then he asked, do Black people have to pay for their doctors, too? Because that's what TV programs had said. I smiled a little at this and told him it's not only Black people who have to pay for doctors and medical care; all people in America have to. Ah, he said. And suppose you don't have the money to pay? Well, I said, if you don't have the money to pay, sometimes you died. And there was no mistaking my gesture, even though he had to wait for the translator to translate it. We left him looking absolutely nonplussed, standing in the middle of the square with his mouth open and his hand under his chin staring after me, as in utter amazement that human beings could die from lack of medical care. It's things like that that keep me dreaming about Russia long after I've returned. — 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

For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. — 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

I cannot recall the words of my first poem but I remember a promise I made my pen never to leave it lying in somebody else's blood. — Audre Lorde

We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way. — Audre Lorde

My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restriction of externally imposed definition. — Audre Lorde

The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations that we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us. — Audre Lorde

Survival is not a theory. In what way do I contribute to the subjugation of any part of those who I define as my people? Insight must illuminate the particulars of our lives: who labors to make the bread we waste, or the energy it takes to make nuclear poisons which will not biodegrade for one thousand years; or who goes blind assembling the microtransistors in our inexpensive calculators? — Audre Lorde

I have suckled the wolf's lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter. — Audre Lorde

Hopefully, we can learn from the 60s that we cannot afford to do our enemies work by destroying each other. — 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

Self-care is not about self-indulgence , it is about self-preservati on. — Audre Lorde

But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women. — Audre Lorde

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

The Seventh Sense
Women
who build nations
learn
to love
men
who build nations
learn
to love
children
building sand castles
by the rising sea — Audre Lorde

What I leave behind has a life of its own. — Audre Lorde

Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women. — 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

In other words, I would be giving in to a myth of sameness which I think can destroy us. — Audre Lorde

The linkage of passion to dominance/subordination is the prototype of the heterosexual image of male-female relationships, one which justifies pornography. Women are supposed to love being brutalized. This is also the prototypical justification of all relationships of oppression - that the subordinate one who is "different" enjoys the inferior position. — 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

The black unicorn was mistaken for a shadow or symbol and taken through a cold country where mist painted mockeries of my fury. — Audre Lorde

I see protest as a genuine means of encouraging someone to feel the inconsistencies, the horror, of the lives we are living. Social protest is to say that we do not have to live this way. If we feel deeply, as we encourage ourselves and others to feel deeply, we will, within that feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, we can love deeply, we can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy. And when they do not, we will ask, "Why don't they?" And it is the asking that will lead us inevitably toward change. — 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

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

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

For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. — 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

If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core
the fountain
of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. (From "Poetry is Not a Luxury") — Audre Lorde

How are you practicing what you preach - whatever you preach, and who is exactly listening? — Audre Lorde

I heard my old friend Clem's voice coming back to me through the dimness of thirty years: "I see you coming here trying to make sense where there is no sense. Try just living in it. Respond, alter, see what happens." I thought of the African way of perceiving life, as experience to be lived rather than as problem to be solved. — Audre Lorde

My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I'm going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity. — Audre Lorde

Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men. — Audre Lorde

It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies. — Audre Lorde

As Black people, if there is one thing we can learn from the 60s, it is how infinitely complex any move for liberation must be. For we must move against not only those forces which dehumanize us from the outside, but also against those oppressive values which we have been forced to take into ourselves. Through examining the combination of our triumphs and errors, we can examine the dangers of an incomplete vision. Not to condemn that vision but to alter it, construct templates for possible futures, and focus our rage for change upon our enemies rather than upon each other. — Audre Lorde

Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. — 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