Audre Lorde - Die Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

View all Audre Lorde Quotes

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

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

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 fear of death is that you are dying too soon. Nobody wants to, but at the point that you die you can pray that you are no longer the same person. I pray that when I am about to die I will not be the same person that I am now.

Audre Lorde

[Speaking] is never without fear; of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now, that if I were to have been born mute, and had maintained an oath of silence my whole life for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die.

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