Audre Lorde Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Audre Lorde quotes, sayings and quotations 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.
— Audre Lorde
Poetry is not a luxury.
— Audre Lorde
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.
— Audre Lorde
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.
— Audre Lorde
I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for Humanities conference a year ago ...
— Audre Lorde
Stoicism and silence does not serve us nor our communities, only the forces of things as they are.
— Audre Lorde
When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.
— Audre Lorde
Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.
— Audre Lorde
Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer.
— Audre Lorde
Tenses are a way of ordering the chaos around time.
— Audre Lorde
Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures.
— Audre Lorde
Dark-bright fire lit eyes
— Audre Lorde
Art is not living. It is the use of living.
— Audre Lorde
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
— Audre Lorde
We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society.
— Audre Lorde
Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away.
— Audre Lorde
In other words, I would be giving in to a myth of sameness which I think can destroy us.
— Audre Lorde
Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone; who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.
— 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
unblinded?
How much of this pain
can I use? — Audre Lorde
Learning not to crumple before these uncertainties fuels my resolve to print myself upon the texture of each day fully rather than forever.
— Audre Lorde
We recognize that all knowledge is mediated through the body and that feeling is a profound source of information about our lives
— 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
It is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.
— Audre Lorde
The cockroach
who is dying
and the woman
who is blind
agree
not to notice
each other's shame. — Audre Lorde
who is dying
and the woman
who is blind
agree
not to notice
each other's shame. — Audre Lorde
If you don't define yourself for yourself then you will be crushed into other's fantasies of you and eaten alive
— 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
We're supposed to see "universal" love as heterosexual. What I insist upon in my work is that there is no such thing as universal love in literature.
— 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
I cannot shut you out the way I shut the others out, so maybe I can destroy you. Must destroy you?
— Audre Lorde
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.
— Audre Lorde
...oppression is as American as apple pie...
— Audre Lorde
Women are powerful and dangerous.
— 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
Hopefully, we can learn from the 60s that we cannot afford to do our enemies work by destroying each other.
— Audre Lorde
When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.
— Audre Lorde
I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.
— Audre Lorde
I am very, very happy for Alice Walker.
— Audre Lorde
There is no such thing as a single issue struggle because we do not lead single issue lives.
— Audre Lorde
There are many kinds of open ... Love is a word, another kind of open ... Take my word for jewel in your open light.
— Audre Lorde
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
— Audre Lorde
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
— Audre Lorde
How are you practicing what you preach - whatever you preach, and who is exactly listening?
— Audre Lorde
I cannot recall the words of my first poem but I remember a promise I made my pen never to leave it lying in somebody else's blood.
— Audre Lorde
All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing ...
— Audre Lorde
Anger is loaded with information and energy.
— Audre Lorde
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
— Audre Lorde
I am my best work - a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.
— Audre Lorde
I feel, therefore I can be free.
— Audre Lorde
What I leave behind has a life of its own.
— Audre Lorde
Without community, there is no liberation.
— Audre Lorde
Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action.
— Audre Lorde
Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare.
— Audre Lorde
I have died too many deaths
that were not mine. — Audre Lorde
that were not mine. — Audre Lorde
I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.
— Audre Lorde
Say what you have to say now! Don't wait until you're sending blips from the other side.
— Audre Lorde
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.
— Audre Lorde
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
— 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
In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.
— Audre Lorde
My fear of anger taught me nothing.
— Audre Lorde
The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival.
— Audre Lorde
The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children. — Audre Lorde
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children. — Audre Lorde
We have too often been expected to speak
all things to all people and speak everyone else's position
but our own. — Audre Lorde
all things to all people and speak everyone else's position
but our own. — Audre Lorde
And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.
— Audre Lorde
Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
— Audre Lorde
Silence has never brought us anything of worth.
— 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
Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us, wherever and however we are standing, in whatever arena we choose.
— 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
My experience with people who tried to label me was that they usually did it to either dismiss me or use me.
— Audre Lorde
Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.
— Audre Lorde
Some of our finest writers, organizers, artists, and scholars in the 60s as well as today, have been lesbian and gay, and history will bear me out.
— 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
When times are hard, do something. If it works, do it some more. If it does not work, do something else. But keep going.
— Audre Lorde
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
— Audre Lorde