Audre Lorde - Sister Outsider (1984)

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The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

Audre Lorde
If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.

Audre Lorde
The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.

Audre Lorde
Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.

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
It is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are-until the poem-nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.

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
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
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
We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.

Audre Lorde
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

Audre Lorde
Rape is not aggressive sexuality, it is sexualized aggression.

Audre Lorde
Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.

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

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

Audre Lorde
The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us—the poet —whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.

Audre Lorde
It is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others-for their use and to our detriment.

Audre Lorde
For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection, which is so feared by a patriarchal world...

Audre Lorde
The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our own oppression as women.

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

Audre Lorde
I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for Humanities conference a year ago....

Audre Lorde
I stand here as a black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism and homophobia are inseparable....

Audre Lorde
Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.

Audre Lorde
Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us, wherever and however we are standing, in whatever arena we choose.

Audre Lorde
The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference....

Audre Lorde
My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restriction of externally imposed definition.

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
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
The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those boundaries.

Audre Lorde