Top 257 Quotes & Sayings by Audre Lorde - Page 3

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.

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.

I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.

Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.

Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. . . .

I am a reflection of my mother’s secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers

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.

You'd better name yourself, because, if you don't others will do it for you.

Art is not living. It is the use of living. The artist has the ability to take the living and use it in a certain way and produce art.

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.

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.

From my membership in all of these groups I have learned that oppression and the intolerance of difference come in all shapes and sizes and colors and sexualities; and that among those of us who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of oppression.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.

How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live unblinded? How much of this pain can I use?

If you don’t define yourself for yourself then you will be crushed into other's fantasies of you and eaten alive

Learning not to crumple before these uncertainties fuels my resolve to print myself upon the texture of each day fully rather than forever.

Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.

We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.

The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival.

One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.

Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.

Hopefully, we can learn from the 60s that we cannot afford to do our enemies work by destroying each other.

The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those boundaries.

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.

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation.

To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society

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.

We are powerful because we have survived

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change.

I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness as well as my womaness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable.

In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.

Raising Black children-female and male-in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive.

The more I use my strength in the service of my vision the less I am afraid.

Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us, wherever and however we are standing, in whatever arena we choose.

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.

the fear of death is that you are dying too soon. Nobody wants to, but at the point that you die you can pray that you are no longer the same person. I pray that when I am about to die I will not be the same person that I am now.

pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.

Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures.

I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast.

Self-care is not about self-indulgence , it is about self-preservati on.

Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer.

What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.

Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged... We have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression... Survival is learning to take our difference and make them strengths.

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.

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.

When I hear the deepest truths I speak coming out of my mouth sounding like my mother's, even remembering how I fought against her, I have to reassess both our relationship as well as the sources of my knowing.

I stand here as a black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism and homophobia are inseparable. . . .

I am Black because I come from the earth's inside now take my word for jewel in the open light.

Raising Black children — female and male — in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive. And in order to survive they must let go. This is what mothers teach — love, survival — that is, self-definition and letting go.

Some words live in my throat breeding like adders. Others know sun seeking like gypsies over my tongue to explode through my lips

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.

If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color? What is the theory behind racist feminism?

We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.

to that piece in each of us that refuses to be silent.

If you come as softly As wind within the trees You may hear what I hear See what sorrow sees. If you come as lightly As threading dew I will take you gladly Nor ask more of you. You may sit beside me Silent as a breath Only those who stay dead Shall remember death. And if you come I will be silent Nor speak harsh words to you. I will not ask you why, now. Or how, or what you do. We shall sit here, softly Beneath two different years And the rich earth between us Shall drink our tears.

We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

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. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt.

So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.