quotes by Audre Lorde

"When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid."
— Audre Lorde

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

"Your silence will not protect you."
— Audre Lorde

"I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood."
— Audre Lorde

"and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive"
— Audre Lorde (The Black Unicorn: Poems)

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

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

"and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak"
— Audre Lorde

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

"Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought."
— 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

"Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care."
— Audre Lorde

"Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge."
— Audre Lorde

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

"Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill...For the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change."
— Audre Lorde

"I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self."
— Audre Lorde (Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches)

"My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences."
— Audre Lorde (The Cancer Journals: Special Edition)

"The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
"
— Audre Lorde

"Without community, there is no liberation."
— Audre Lorde

"“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” "
— Audre Lorde (Our Dead Behind Us: Poems)

"Revolution is not a one time event. "
— 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

"The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives."
— 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

"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 (The Cancer Journals: Special Edition)

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

"I know the anger lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other."
— Audre Lorde (Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches)

"“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”"
— Audre Lorde

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

"For within livin structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets."
— Audre Lorde (Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches)

"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

"If you come as softly
As wind within the trees
You may hear what I hear
See what sorrow sees.

If you come as lightly
As threading dew
I will take you gladly
Nor ask more of you.

You may sit beside me
Silent as a breath
Only those who stay dead
Shall remember death.

And if you come I will be silent
Nor speak harsh words to you.
I will not ask you why, now.
Or how, or what you do.

We shall sit here, softly
Beneath two different years
And the rich earth between us
Shall drink our tears."
— Audre Lorde

"I soon discovered that if you keep your mouth shut, people are apt to believe you know everything, and they begin to feel freer and freer to tell you anything, anxious to show that they know something, too."
— Audre Lorde

"It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand."
— Audre Lorde (The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde)

"When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
"
— Audre Lorde

""When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid" "
— 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

"...oppression is as American as apple pie... "
— Audre Lorde

"Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before."
— Audre Lorde

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

"see me now
your severed daughter
laughing our name into echo
all the world shall remember "
— Audre Lorde (The Black Unicorn: Poems)

"to that piece in each of us that refuses to be silent."
— Audre Lorde

"If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they probably will not survive."
— Audre Lorde

"I am deliberate and afraid of nothing."
— Audre Lorde

"We must be the change we wish to see in the world."
— Audre Lorde

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

"
— Audre Lorde

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

"“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
"
— Audre Lorde

"...and if they do not learn to love and resist at they same time, then they cannot survive."
— Audre Lorde