Top 100 Audre Quotes
#1. Always
in the middle
of our bloodiest battles
you lay down your arms
like flowering mines
to conqueror me home,
-Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde
#2. You can not take down the master's house with the master's tools
Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde
#3. 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
#4. Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
Audre Lorde
#5. Learning not to crumple before these uncertainties fuels my resolve to print myself upon the texture of each day fully rather than forever.
Audre Lorde
#6. The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference ...
Audre Lorde
#7. 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
#8. Out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that knows
comes the shape I am seeking for reason.
Audre Lorde
#9. What you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority
Audre Lorde
#11. Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.
Audre Lorde
#12. 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
#13. How hard it is to sleep
in the middle of life.
Audre Lorde
#14. I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.
Audre Lorde
#15. I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.
Audre Lorde
#16. Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.
Audre Lorde
#17. If I ever really sounded
I would rupture
your eardrums
or your heart.
Audre Lorde
#18. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action.
Audre Lorde
#19. Women on trains
have a life
that is exactly livable
the precision of days flashing past
Audre Lorde
#20. To that piece in each of us that refuses to be silent.
Audre Lorde
#21. 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
#22. If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.
Audre Lorde
#23. You'd better name yourself, because, if you don't others will do it for you.
Audre Lorde
#24. Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.
Audre Lorde
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. In discussions around the hiring and firing of Black faculty at universities, the charge is frequently heard that Black women are more easily hired than are Black men.
Audre Lorde
#29. The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself.
Audre Lorde
#30. 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
#31. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.
Audre Lorde
#32. I cannot recall the words of my first poem but I remember a promise I made my pen never to leave it lying in somebody else's blood.
Audre Lorde
#33. I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast.
Audre Lorde
#34. Silence and invisibility go hand in hand with powerlessness ...
Audre Lorde
#35. 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
#36. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
Audre Lorde
#37. I have suckled the wolf's lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter.
Audre Lorde
#38. If you can't change reality, change your perceptions of it.
Audre Lorde
#39. When patriarchy dismisses us, it encourages our murderers.
Audre Lorde
#40. Tenses are a way of ordering the chaos around time.
Audre Lorde
#41. Silence has never brought us anything of worth.
Audre Lorde
#42. 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
#43. We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.
Audre Lorde
#44. But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.
Audre Lorde
#45. I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.
Audre Lorde
#46. I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for Humanities conference a year ago ...
Audre Lorde
#47. The more I use my strength in the service of my vision the less I am afraid ...
Audre Lorde
#48. Young seeds that have not seen sun forget and drown easily.
Audre Lorde
#49. 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
#50. June Jordan once said something which is just wonderful. I'm paraphrasing her-that her function as a poet was to make revolution irresistible. Well o.k. that is the function of us all, as creative artists, to make the truth, as we see it irresistible.
Audre Lorde
#51. It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
Audre Lorde
#52. I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me - to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.
Audre Lorde
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
Audre Lorde
#57. 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
#58. The cockroach
who is dying
and the woman
who is blind
agree
not to notice
each other's shame.
Audre Lorde
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society.
Audre Lorde
#62. Whenever a conscious Black woman raises her voice on issues central to her existence, somebody is going to call her strident, because they don't want to hear about it, nor us. I refuse to be silenced and I refuse to be trivialized, even if I do not say what I have to say perfectly.
Audre Lorde
#63. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
Audre Lorde
#64. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society
Audre Lorde
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. One shard of brilliant summer pierced me
and remains.
By this only
unregenerate bone
I am not dead, but waiting.
Audre Lorde
#68. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling ...
Audre Lorde
#69. I have died too many deaths
that were not mine.
Audre Lorde
#70. 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
#71. Within each one of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust.
Audre Lorde
#72. What do we want from each other
after we have told our stories
Audre Lorde
#73. Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.
Audre Lorde
#74. 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
#75. When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.
Audre Lorde
#77. We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.
Audre Lorde
#78. Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.
Audre Lorde
#79. I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.
Audre Lorde
#80. All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing ...
Audre Lorde
#81. How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live
unblinded?
How much of this pain
can I use?
Audre Lorde
#82. Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded ...
Audre Lorde
#83. What better way is there to police the streets of a minority community than to turn one generation against the other?
Audre Lorde
#84. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
Audre Lorde
#85. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest.
Audre Lorde
#86. I believe one of the hardest things you can do is conquer your fears, but if you have a goal, then it's your job to open up and let it be real no matter how scary it seems.
Audre Lorde
#87. Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.
Audre Lorde
#88. I am still learning - how to take joy in all the people I am, how to use all my selves in the service of what I believe, how to accept when I fail and rejoice when I succeed.
Audre Lorde
#89. As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become "other," the outsider whose experience and tradition is too "alien" to comprehend.
Audre Lorde
#90. Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.
Audre Lorde
#91. Pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.
Audre Lorde
#92. Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
Audre Lorde
#93. But, on the other hand, I get bored with racism too and recognize that there are still many things to be said about a Black person and a White person loving each other in a racist society.
Audre Lorde
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.
Audre Lorde
#97. If this society ascribes roles to Black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it Black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing?
Audre Lorde
#98. 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
#99. My experience with people who tried to label me was that they usually did it to either dismiss me or use me.
Audre Lorde
#100. Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly "inferior" capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.
Audre Lorde
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