Zami Quotes

“I cried to think of how lucky we both were to have found each other, since it was clear that we were the only ones in the world who could understand what we understood in the instantaneous manner in which we understood it.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. but people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that poin was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret of not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving.
It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“A choice of pains. That's what living was all about.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me-so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“I wasn't cute or passive enough to be "femme," and I wasn't mean or tough enough to be "butch." I was given a wide berth. Non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“To go to bed and to wake up again day afte day besides a woman, to lie in bed with our arms around each other and drift in and out of sleep, to be with each other not as a quick stolen pleasure, nor as a wild treat but like sunlight, day after day in the regualr course of our lives. I was discovering all the ways that love creeps into life when two selves exist closely, when two women meet.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“I forgot what we were celebrating. Because we were always celebrating something, a new job, a new poem, a new love, a new dream.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful. We wanted to believe that it could give word to my inchoate pain and rages; that it could enable Muriel to face the world and get a job; that it could free our writings, cure racism, end homophobia and adolescent acne.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“Dark-bright fire lit eyes”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“I lost my sister, Gennie, to my silence and her pain and despair, to both our angers and to a world’s cruelty that destroys its own young in passing - not even as a rebel gesture or sacrifice or hope for another living of the spirit, but out of not noticing or caring about the destruction. I have never been able to blind myself to that cruelty, which according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“Any world which did not have a place for me loving women was not a world in which I wanted to live, nor one which I could fight for.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“It is the images of women, kind and cruel, that lead me home”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“I have always wanted to be both man and woman...to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks. I would like to enter a woman the way any man can, and be entered--to leave and to be left--to be hot and hard and soft all at the same time in the cause of our loving.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“In a paradoxical sense, once I accepted my position as different from the larger society as well as from any single-sub-society--black or gay--I felt I didn't have to try so hard. To be accepted. To look femme. To be straight. To look straight. To be proper. To look "nice". To be liked. To be loved. To be approved. What I didn't realize was how much harder I had to try merely to stay alive, or rather, to stay human. How much stronger a person I became in that trying.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“I am a reflection of my mother's secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“I knew what it was like to be haunted by the ghost of a self one wished to be, but only half-sensed.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“Maybe that is all any bravery is, a stronger fear of not being brave.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough.We were different. Being black together was not enough. We were different. Being black women together was not enough. We were different. Being black dykes together was not enough. We were different.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“It's difficult to talk about double messages without having a twin tongue.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“The breakdown of mummies and daddies was an important part of lesbian relationships in the Bagatelle...For some of us, however, role-playing reflected all the depreciating attitudes toward women which we loathed in straight society. It was the rejection of these roles that had drawn us to 'the life' in the first place. Instinctively, without particular theory or political position or dialectic, we recognized oppression as oppression, no matter where it came from.
But those lesbians who had carved some niche in the pretend world of dominance/subordination rejected what they called our 'confused' lifestyle, and they were in the majority.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“DeLois lived up the block on 142nd Street and never had her hair done, and all the neighbourhood women sucked their teeth as she walked by. Her crispy hair twinkled in the summer sun as her big proud stomach moved her on down the block while I watched, not caring whether or not she was a poem.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“As soon as a challenge was overcome, it creased to be a challenge, becoming the expected and ordinary rather than something I had achieved with difficulty, and could, therefore, be justly proud of. I could not own my own triumphs, nor give myself credit for them.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“would insist it was something else. It was so often her approach to the world; to change reality. If you can’t change reality, change your perceptions of it.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami

“I have often wondered why the farthest-out position always feels so right to me; why extremes, although difficult and sometimes painful to maintain, are always more comfortable than one plan running straight down a line in the unruffled middle.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“But I loved her, because she moved like she felt she was somebody special, like she was somebody I’d like to know someday. She moved like how I thought god’s mother must have moved, and my mother, once upon a time, and someday maybe me.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“Most Black lesbians were closeted, correctly recognizing the Black community's lack of interest in our position, as well as the many more immediate threats to our survival as Black people in a racist society. It was hard enough to be Black, to be Black and female, to be Black and female, and gay. To be Black, female, gay, and out of the closet in a white environment, even to the extent of dancing in the Bagatelle, was considered by many Black lesbians to be simply suicidal.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“I could not let her go, even though so much of me wanted to. An old dream of us together forever in a landscape blinded me.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me— so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins. Another meeting”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

“I never once gave a thought to the days when I believed that bulbs were starburst patterns of color, because that was what all light looked to me.”
― Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name