Audre Lorde quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Audre Lorde on Wise Famous Quotes.

In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.

Poetry is not a luxury.

If I do not bring all of who I am to whatever I do, then I bring nothing, or nothing of lasting worth, for I have withheld my essence.

Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.

When the desire for definition, self or otherwise, comes out of a desire for limitation rather than a desire for expansion, no true face can emerge.

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

Every woman I have ever known has made a lasting impression on my soul.

Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.

When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.

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

I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic

Tenses are a way of ordering the chaos around time.

What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face?

A choice of pains. That's what living was all about.

Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures.

Silence and invisibility go hand in hand with powerlessness ...

Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women.

Dark-bright fire lit eyes

Art is not living. It is the use of living.

The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

See me now
your severed daughter
laughing our name into echo
all the world shall remember

We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society.

In other words, I would be giving in to a myth of sameness which I think can destroy us.

We recognize that all knowledge is mediated through the body and that feeling is a profound source of information about our lives

Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.

Women on trains
have a life
that is exactly livable
the precision of days flashing past

The cockroach
who is dying
and the woman
who is blind
agree
not to notice
each other's shame.

If you don't define yourself for yourself then you will be crushed into other's fantasies of you and eaten alive

To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society

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

What you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority

What do we want from each other
after we have told our stories

There are no honest poems about dead women.

There is no such thing as a single issue struggle because we do not lead single issue lives.

What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope.

I am very, very happy for Alice Walker.

When I use my strength in the service of my vision it makes no difference whether or not I am afraid.

I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.

The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.

Out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that knows
comes the shape I am seeking for reason.

Every Black woman in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers.

But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

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

One shard of brilliant summer pierced me
and remains.
By this only
unregenerate bone
I am not dead, but waiting.

We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.

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

If you can't change reality, change your perceptions of it.

I forgot what we were celebrating. Because we were always celebrating something, a new job, a new poem, a new love, a new dream.

Always
in the middle
of our bloodiest battles
you lay down your arms
like flowering mines
to conqueror me home,
-Audre Lorde

I started writing because I had a need inside of me to create something that was not there

Your silence will not protect you.

There is no Hierarchy of Oppressions

Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.

How hard it is to sleep
in the middle of life.

Revolution is not a one time event.

Young seeds that have not seen sun forget and drown easily.

Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs.

Say what you have to say now! Don't wait until you're sending blips from the other side.

If I ever really sounded
I would rupture
your eardrums
or your heart.

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house

When times are hard, do something. If it works, do it some more. If it does not work, do something else. But keep going.

Art is not living. It is a use of living. The artist has the ability to take that living and use it in a certain way, and produce art.

Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action.

Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare.

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.

I have died too many deaths
that were not mine.

I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.

Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.

I feel, therefore I can be free.

It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

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

I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.

In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.

Hatred is a death wish for the hated, not a life wish for anything else.

My fear of anger taught me nothing.

The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival.

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

Women are powerful and dangerous.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

The more I use my strength in the service of my vision the less I am afraid ...

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.

How are you practicing what you preach - whatever you preach, and who is exactly listening?

We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.

Anger is loaded with information and energy.

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

I am my best work - a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.

...oppression is as American as apple pie...

There are many kinds of open ... Love is a word, another kind of open ... Take my word for jewel in your open light.

I am not just a lesbian. I am not just a poet. I am not just a mother. Honor the complexity of your vision and yourselves.

I cannot shut you out the way I shut the others out, so maybe I can destroy you. Must destroy you?

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

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

Self-care is not about self-indulgence , it is about self-preservati on.

We have too often been expected to speak
all things to all people and speak everyone else's position
but our own.

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

You can not take down the master's house with the master's tools
Audre Lorde

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