Audre Lorde Quotes

Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Every Black woman in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers.

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

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

Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.

I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.

Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.

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

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.

What do we want from each other after we have told our stories

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

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

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

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

Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.

The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation .

Anger is loaded with information and energy.

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.

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

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

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.

Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action.

Art is not living. It is the use of living.

Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded.

I am my best work - a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.

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.

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

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

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.

Silence has never brought us anything of worth.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.

. . . 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.

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.

stoicism and silence does not serve us nor our communities, only the forces of things as they are.

Poetry is not a luxury.

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