Audre Lorde Quotes

156 Sourced Quotes

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

Audre Lorde
I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk throught the rain.

Audre Lorde
I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side. 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 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
Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

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
If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest.

Audre Lorde
Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged... We have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression... Survival is learning to take our difference and make them strengths.

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

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
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
Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.

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

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
The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.

Audre Lorde
Stoicism and silence does not serve us nor our communities, only the forces of things as they are.

Audre Lorde
Our sons must become men – such men as we hope our daughters, born and unborn, will be pleased to live among. Our sons will not grow into women. Their way is more difficult than that of our daughters, for they must move away from us, without us. Hopefully ours have what they have learned from us, and a howness to forge into their own image.

Audre Lorde
There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.

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
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
Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives....

Audre Lorde
Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.

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

Audre Lorde