Audre Lorde Best 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone; who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy. — 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

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

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