The Selected Works of Audre Lorde Quotes

“It is within our differences that we are both most powerful and most vulnerable, and some of the most difficult tasks of our lives are the claiming of differences and learning to use those differences for bridges rather than as barriers between us.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“I might add here that in no socialist country that I have visited have I found an absence of racism or of sexism, so the eradication of both of these diseases seems to involve more than the abolition of capitalism as an institution.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson—that we were never meant to survive.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“And yes, it is very difficult to stand still and to listen to another woman’s voice delineate an agony I do not share, or one to which I myself have contributed.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“The dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is also false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. For the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic—the sensual—those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“May I never remember reasons
for my spirit's safety
may I never forget
the warning of my woman's flesh
weeping at the new moon
may I never lose
that terror
which keeps me brave
may I owe nothing
that I cannot repay.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“Most of all I think of how important it is for us to share with each other the powers buried within the breaking of silence about our bodies and our health, even though we have been schooled to be secret and stoical about pain and disease. But that stoicism and silence does not serve us nor our communities, only the forces of things as they are.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“Lorde asks us to do the more difficult and radical work of imagining what our realities might look like if masculinity were not the ideal to which we aspire, if heterosexuality were not the ideal to which we aspire, if whiteness were not the ideal to which we aspire.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“And 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, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself - a Black woman warrior poet doing my work - come to ask you, are you doing yours?”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“For the first time I really feel that my writing has a substance and stature that will survive me.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“dealing with the role of difference within the lives of american women: difference of race, sexuality, class, and age. The absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political. It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

“And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.”
― Audre Lorde, The Selected Works of Audre Lorde