Quotes & Sayings About Love By Audre Lorde

Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful. We wanted to believe that it could give word to my inchoate pain and rages; that it could enable Muriel to face the world and get a job; that it could free our writings, cure racism, end homophobia and adolescent acne. — Audre Lorde

I cried to think of how lucky we both were to have found each other, since it was clear that we were the only ones in the world who could understand what we understood in the instantaneous manner in which we understood it. — 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

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

If you do not learn to hate you will never be lonely enough to love easily nor will you always be brave, although it does not grow any easier. Do not pretend to convenient beliefs, even when they are righteous; you will never be able to defend your city while shouting. — Audre Lorde

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. — Audre Lorde

Raising Black children - female and male - in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive. — Audre Lorde

I have found that battling despair does not mean closing my eyes to the enormity of the tasks of effecting change, nor ignoring the strength and the barbarity of the forces aligned against us. It means teaching, surviving and fighting with the most important resource I have, myself, and taking joy in that battle. It means, for me, recognizing the enemy outside, and the enemy within, and knowing that my work is part of a continuum of women's work, of reclaiming this earth and our power, and knowing that this work did not begin with my birth nor will it end with my death. And it means knowing that within this continuum, my life and my love and my work has particular power and meaning relative to others. — 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

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

I forgot what we were celebrating. Because we were always celebrating something, a new job, a new poem, a new love, a new dream. — 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

Always
in the middle
of our bloodiest battles
you lay down your arms
like flowering mines
to conqueror me home,
-Audre Lorde — Audre Lorde

We're supposed to see "universal" love as heterosexual. What I insist upon in my work is that there is no such thing as universal love in literature. — Audre Lorde

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! — 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

If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they probably will not survive. — 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

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

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

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 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

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