Audre Lorde Quotes

155 Sourced Quotes

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

Audre Lorde
I learned from you
to define myself
through your denials.

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

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

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

Audre Lorde
Unity does not require that we be identical to each other. Black women are not one great vat of homogenized chocolate milk.

Audre Lorde
Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us, wherever and however we are standing, in whatever arena we choose.

Audre Lorde
Racism Cancer. In both cases, to win the aggressor must conquer, but the resisters need only survive.

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
I am Black because I come from the earth's inside
now take my word for jewel in the open light.

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
When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying.

Audre Lorde
What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?

Audre Lorde
The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference....

Audre Lorde
Whenever a conscious Black woman raises her voice on issues central to her existence, somebody is going to call her strident, because they don't want to hear about it, nor us. I refuse to be silenced and I refuse to be trivialized, even if I do not say what I have to say perfectly.

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 oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those boundaries.

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
The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself.

Audre Lorde
The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation.

Audre Lorde
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
Some words live in my throat
breeding like adders. Others know sun
seeking like gypsies over my tongue
to explode through my lips

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

Audre Lorde
Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.

Audre Lorde