Audre Lorde Quotes

155 Sourced Quotes

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

Audre Lorde
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.

Audre Lorde
When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less important whether or not I am unafraid.

Audre Lorde
I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

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

Audre Lorde
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.

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

Audre Lorde
Rape is not aggressive sexuality, it is sexualized aggression.

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 master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

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
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
In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.

Audre Lorde
The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling....

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
History may alter old pretenses and victories
but not the pain my sister never the pain.

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
I learned from you
to define myself
through your denials.

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

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
We must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply and so many of our old ideas disparage.

Audre Lorde
Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain. When I live through pain without recognizing it, self-consciously, I rob myself of the power that can come from using that pain, the power to fuel some movement beyond it.

Audre Lorde
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence.

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
When I speak of the erotic, then I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, 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
The secret to 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
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.

Audre Lorde
Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill...For the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change.

Audre Lorde
And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.

Audre Lorde