Sister Outsider Quotes

“Your silence will not protect you.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“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

“Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose
the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution,
but more usually
we must do battle where we are standing.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“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

“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, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“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

“Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy,we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing...But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“I cannot shut you out the way I shut the others out, so maybe I can destroy you. Must destroy you?”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live
unblinded?
How much of this pain
can I use?”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I'm not excluding you from the joining - I'm broadening the joining.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideasl The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves--along with the renewed courage to try them out.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“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, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“What makes her eyes slide o� of mine? What does she see that angers her so, or infuriates her, or disgusts her? Why do I want to break her face o� where her eyes do not meet mine? Why does she wear my sister's face? My daughter's mouth turned down about to suck itself in? The eyes of a furious and rejected lover? Why do I dream I cradle you at night? Divide your limbs between the food bowls of my least favorite animals? Keep vigil to you night after terrible night, wondering? Oh sister, where is that dark rich land we wanted to wander through together? . . . [W]hose future image have we destroyed --your face or mine-- without either how shall I look again at both --lacking either is lacking myself.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches