Audre Lorde Quotes

Quotes about:

• It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

  Audre Lorde

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Equality

  265 Copy quote
• 

  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

  Strong Women, Honesty, Silence

  Audre Lorde (1995). “The Black Unicorn: Poems”, p.25, W. W. Norton & Company

  218 Copy quote

• 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

  Future, Joy, Tomorrow

  Audre Lorde (2017). “A Burst of Light: And Other Essays”, p.96, Courier Dover Publications

  161 Copy quote

• The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations that we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us.

  Audre Lorde

  Focus, Pieces, Revolutionary

  73 Copy quote

• Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

  Audre Lorde

  Caring, Compassion, Self

  Audre Lorde (2017). “A Burst of Light: And Other Essays”, p.130, Courier Dover Publications

  220 Copy quote

• There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

  Audre Lorde

  Struggle, Issues, Feminism

  221 Copy quote

• We are all in the process of becoming.

  Audre Lorde

  Graduation, Becoming, Process

  27 Copy quote

• 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

  Inspirational, Strength, Success

  "The Cancer Journals". Book by Audre Lorde, 1980.

  225 Copy quote

• Without community, there is no liberation.

  Audre Lorde

  Change, Community, Collaboration

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.112, Crossing Press

  44 Copy quote

• Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.

  Audre Lorde

  Women, Responsibility, Gay

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.115, Crossing Press

  164 Copy quote

• 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.

  Audre Lorde

  Believe, Fire, Order

  18 Copy quote

• I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

  Audre Lorde

  Feminist, Fearless, Different

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.132, Crossing Press

  182 Copy quote

• It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those other identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make the strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

  Audre Lorde

  Order, Differences, House

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.112, Crossing Press

  160 Copy quote

• Divide and conquer must become define and empower.

  Audre Lorde

  Empowering, Conquer, Divide And Conquer

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.112, Crossing Press

  120 Copy quote

• The speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.

  Audre Lorde

  Love You, Creativity, Missing

  185 Copy quote

• Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.

  Audre Lorde

  Hatred, Black History, Doe

  15 Copy quote

• If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

  Audre Lorde

  Inspiring, Being Yourself, People

  188 Copy quote

• 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

  Voice, Issues, Black

  Audre Lorde, Joan Wylie Hall (2004). “Conversations with Audre Lorde”, p.197, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  57 Copy quote

• My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restriction of externally imposed definition.

  Audre Lorde

  Self, Who I Am, Energy

  41 Copy quote

• For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

  Audre Lorde

  Real, Games, Differences

  53 Copy quote

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

  Audre Lorde

  Self, Silence, Action

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.42, Crossing Press

  12 Copy quote

• Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it. ... pain will always either change or stop. Always. ... The confidence that it will change is what makes bearing it possible. So pain is fluid. It is only when you conceive of it as something static that it is unbearable.

  Audre Lorde

  Pain, Important, Unbearable

  Audre Lorde, Joan Wylie Hall (2004). “Conversations with Audre Lorde”, p.16, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Blessed, Battle, Able

  Audre Lorde (2017). “A Burst of Light: And Other Essays”, p.119, Courier Dover Publications

  58 Copy quote

• Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.

  Audre Lorde

  I Love You, Inspiring, Valentines Day

  Audre Lorde (2000). “The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde”, p.64, W. W. Norton & Company

  22 Copy quote

• Institutionalized rejection of differences is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate.

  Audre Lorde

  Thinking, Differences, People

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.115, Crossing Press

  79 Copy quote

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