Audre Lorde - Pain Quotes

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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
How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live unblinded? How much of this pain can I use?

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

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
Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain. When I live through pain without recognizing it, self-consciously, I rob myself of the power that can come from using that pain, the power to fuel some movement beyond it.

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

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