Audre Lorde - The Cancer Journals (1980)

16 Sourced Quotes

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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
Silence and invisibility go hand in hand with powerlessness.

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
Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.

Audre Lorde
Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.

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
What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?

Audre Lorde
I am a post-mastectomy woman who believes our feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and of use.

Audre Lorde
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.

Audre Lorde
Ironshod horses rage back and forth over every nerve.

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 transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation.

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
If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core — the fountain — of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. (From "Poetry is Not a Luxury")

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
What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?

Audre Lorde