Audre Lorde quotes

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)
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences. View quote
Audre Lorde
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. View quote
Audre Lorde
Your silence will not protect you. View quote
Audre Lorde
The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference. View quote
Audre Lorde
We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other. View quote
Audre Lorde
If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive. View quote
Audre Lorde
Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever. View quote
Audre Lorde
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. View quote
Audre Lorde
The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot. View quote
Audre Lorde
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing. (Audre Lorde)
Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge. View quote
Audre Lorde
But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women. View quote
Audre Lorde
My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I'm going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity. View quote
Audre Lorde
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. View quote
Audre Lorde
Revolution is not a one time event. View quote
Audre Lorde
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. View quote
Audre Lorde
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. View quote
Audre Lorde
When I speak of the erotic, then I speak of it as an assertion of the life force 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. View quote
Audre Lorde
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. View quote
Audre Lorde
For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. (Audre Lorde)
I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too? View quote
Audre Lorde
Oppression is as American as apple pie. View quote
Audre Lorde
For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, "Beautiful and tough as chestnut/stanchions against our nightmare of weakness” and of impotence.These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. View quote
Audre Lorde
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. View quote
Audre Lorde