Audre Lorde Quotes

155 Sourced Quotes

So long as your death is a leaving
it will never be my last.

Audre Lorde
I am a reflection of my mother's secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers.

Audre Lorde
Ironshod horses rage back and forth over every nerve.

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 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
Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.

Audre Lorde
I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or chisel to remind you of your me-ness as I discover you in myself.

Audre Lorde
I do not believe
our wants
have made our lies
holy.

Audre Lorde
Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever / Only, nothing is eternal.

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
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.

Audre Lorde
Our visions are essential to create that which has never been, and we must each learn to use all of who we are to achieve those visions.

Audre Lorde
Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.

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
Who I am is what fulfills me and fulfills the vision I have of the world.

Audre Lorde
I have survived
the gifts still puzzling me
as in the voice of my departing mother
...
teaching me how to die insisting
death is not a disease.

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
I write for those 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 would save us, but it won't.

Audre Lorde
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.

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 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. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.

Audre Lorde
In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.

Audre Lorde
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

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

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
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.

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
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