Audre Lorde Quotes

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.

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

There is no Hierarchy of Oppressions

Silence and invisibility go hand in hand with powerlessness.

Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away.

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.

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.

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.

When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.

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.

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

We are powerful because we have survived

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.

Women are powerful and dangerous.

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.

I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too?

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.

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.

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

Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action.

I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for Humanities conference a year ago. . . .

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.

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.

Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare.

Every woman I have ever known has made a lasting impression on my soul.

If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.

My fear of anger taught me nothing.

If you can't change reality, change your perceptions of it.

Afraid is a country with no exit visas.

I cannot shut you out the way I shut the others out, so maybe I can destroy you. Must destroy you?

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.

Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.

It is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others-for their use and to our detriment.

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

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

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

In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.

There are no honest poems about dead women.

What I leave behind has a life of its own.

All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing.