Top 100 Audre Lorde Quotes
#1. The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference ...
Audre Lorde
#2. I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.
Audre Lorde
#3. If I ever really sounded
I would rupture
your eardrums
or your heart.
Audre Lorde
#4. 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
#5. If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.
Audre Lorde
#6. You'd better name yourself, because, if you don't others will do it for you.
Audre Lorde
#7. For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection, which is so feared by a patriarchal world ...
Audre Lorde
#8. We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.
Audre Lorde
#9. 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
#10. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
Audre Lorde
#11. 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
#12. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
Audre Lorde
#13. I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.
Audre Lorde
#14. I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for Humanities conference a year ago ...
Audre Lorde
#15. Young seeds that have not seen sun forget and drown easily.
Audre Lorde
#16. 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
#17. I would like to do another piece of fiction dealing with a number of issues: Lesbian parenting, the 1960's, and interracial relationships in the Lesbian and Gay community.
Audre Lorde
#18. 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
#19. Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
Audre Lorde
#21. The cockroach
who is dying
and the woman
who is blind
agree
not to notice
each other's shame.
Audre Lorde
#22. 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
#23. What happens when you narrow your definition to what is convenient, or what is fashionable, or what is expected, is dishonesty by silence.
Audre Lorde
#24. 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
#25. I became more courageous by doing the very things I needed to be courageous for-first, a little, and badly. Then, bit by bit, more and better. Being avidly-sometimes annoy-ingly-curious and persistent about discovering how others were doing what I wanted to do.
Audre Lorde
#26. What do we want from each other
after we have told our stories
Audre Lorde
#27. Once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy.
Audre Lorde
#28. We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.
Audre Lorde
#29. Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.
Audre Lorde
#30. Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
Audre Lorde
#31. 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
#32. As we come to know, accept, and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas-the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.
Audre Lorde
#33. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.
Audre Lorde
#34. 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
#35. Nobody was dreaming about me. Nobody was even studying me except as something to wipe out.
Audre Lorde
#36. 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
#37. I am a post-mastectomy woman who believes our feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and of use.
Audre Lorde
#38. There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
Audre Lorde
#40. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.
Audre Lorde
#41. 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
#42. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.
Audre Lorde
#43. I train myself for triumph by knowing it is mine no matter what.
Audre Lorde
#44. 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
#45. There are many lesbians and gay men trapped by their fear into silence and invisibility, and they exist in a dim valley of terror wearing nooses of conformity.
Audre Lorde
#46. You know how fighting fish do it? They blow bubbles and in each one of those bubbles is an egg and they float the egg up to the surface. They keep this whole heavy nest of eggs floating, and they're constantly repairing it. It's as if they live in both elements.
Audre Lorde
#47. Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.
Audre Lorde
#48. We have too often been expected to speak
all things to all people and speak everyone else's position
but our own.
Audre Lorde
#49. The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.
Audre Lorde
#50. Every Black woman in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers.
Audre Lorde
#51. I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees.
Audre Lorde
#52. As a living creature I am part of two kinds of forces- growth and decay, sprouting and withering, living and dying- and at any given moment of our lives, each one of us is actively located somewhere along a continuum between these two forces.
Audre Lorde
#53. Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures.
Audre Lorde
#54. What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?
Audre Lorde
#55. 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
#56. It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.
Audre Lorde
#57. What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope.
Audre Lorde
#58. There are lesbians, God knows ... if you came up through lesbian circles in the forties and fifties in New York ... who were not feminist and would not call themselves feminists.
Audre Lorde
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. There are no honest poems about dead women.
Audre Lorde
#62. You cannot, you cannot use someone else's fire. You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it.
Audre Lorde
#63. Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
Audre Lorde
#64. It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we'll make it.
Audre Lorde
#65. I do not want to be tolerated, or misnamed. I want to be recognized.
Audre Lorde
#66. If you do not learn to hate you will never be lonely enough to love easily nor will you always be brave, although it does not grow any easier. Do not pretend to convenient beliefs, even when they are righteous; you will never be able to defend your city while shouting.
Audre Lorde
#67. 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
#68. Anger is loaded with information and energy.
Audre Lorde
#69. And I find I must remember that the pain is not its own reason for being. It is a part of living. And the only kind of pain that is intolerable is pain that is wasteful, pain from which we do not learn. And I think that we must learn to distinguish between the two.
Audre Lorde
#70. I was going to die, if not sooner, then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.
Audre Lorde
#71. One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.
Audre Lorde
#72. There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
Audre Lorde
#73. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.
Audre Lorde
#74. 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
#75. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.
Audre Lorde
#76. Say what you have to say now! Don't wait until you're sending blips from the other side.
Audre Lorde
#77. Part of the lesbian consciousness is an absolute recognition of the erotic within our lives and, taking that a step further, dealing with the erotic not only in sexual terms.
Audre Lorde
#78. I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic
Audre Lorde
#79. For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.
Audre Lorde
#80. It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
Audre Lorde
#81. Perhaps ... I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am a lesbian, because I am myself
a Black woman warrior poet doing my work
come to ask you, are you doing yours?
Audre Lorde
#82. Some words live in my throat
breeding like adders. Others know sun
seeking like gypsies over my tongue
to explode through my lips
Audre Lorde
#83. To face the realities of our lives is not a reason for despair-despair is a tool of your enemies. Facing the realities of our lives gives us motivation for action. For you are not powerless ... You know why the hard questions must be asked. It is not altruism, it is self-preservation-survival.
Audre Lorde
#84. See me now
your severed daughter
laughing our name into echo
all the world shall remember
Audre Lorde
#85. Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare.
Audre Lorde
#86. There is a timbre of voice
that comes from not being heard
and knowing / you are not being
heard / noticed only
by others / not heard
for the same reason.
Audre Lorde
#87. Who I am is what fulfills me and fulfills the vision I have of the world.
Audre Lorde
#88. 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
#89. Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to bed at night.
Audre Lorde
#90. The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.
Audre Lorde
#91. Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.
Audre Lorde
#92. But the question is a matter of the survival and the teaching. That's what our work comes down to. No matter where we key into it, it's the same work, just different pieces of ourselves doing it.
Audre Lorde
#93. 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
#94. Art is not living. It is the use of living.
Audre Lorde
#95. Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away.
Audre Lorde
#96. A choice of pains. That's what living was all about.
Audre Lorde
#97. 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
#98. Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.
Audre Lorde
#99. In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.
Audre Lorde
#100. How are you practicing what you preach - whatever you preach, and who is exactly listening?
Audre Lorde
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
