Audre Lorde Quotes

156 Sourced Quotes

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

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
That visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.

Audre Lorde
Pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.

Audre Lorde
In discussions around the hiring and firing of Black faculty at universities, the charge is frequently heard that Black women are more easily hired than are Black men.

Audre Lorde
If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color? What is the theory behind racist feminism?

Audre Lorde
The night was dark
and love was a burning fence
about my house.

Audre Lorde
For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.

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
When the strongest words for what I have to offer come out of me sounding like words I remember from my mother's mouth, then I either have to reassess the meaning of everything I have to say now, or re-examine the worth of her old words.

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
There are so many roots to the tree of anger
that sometimes the branches shatter
before they bear.

Audre Lorde
Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.

Audre Lorde
I would like to do another piece of fiction dealing with a number of issues: Lesbian parenting, the 1960's, and interracial relationships in the Lesbian and Gay community.

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
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
It is not the destiny of Black America to repeat white America's mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life.

Audre Lorde
When you are a member of an out-group, and you challenge others with whom you share this outsider position to examine some aspect of their lives that distorts differences between you, then there can be a great deal of pain.

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 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
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
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
The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.

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

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