Audre Lorde Quotes From Feminism To Self Care

admin — Wed, 14 Mar 2018 22:54:30 +0000

The legendary and iconic, “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Audre Lorde continues to inspire many feminists and womanists with her poetry surrounding the pressing topics of her life, from love to racism to empowerment. Due to her unique experience of the world from her various minority identities, her politics and activism embodies the current struggle of the intersectional feminist movement, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. Whether you feel isolated like an outsider in your community or just feel like nobody quite understands you, these quotes by Audre Lorde should help you find solidarity through a powerful sister like her.

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

Audre Lorde

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

Your silence will not protect you.

Audre Lorde

Silence and invisibility go hand in hand with powerlessness.

Audre Lorde

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

Audre Lorde

I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk throught the rain.

Audre Lorde

What you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority.

Audre Lorde

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

Audre Lorde

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

When the desire for definition, self or otherwise, comes out of a desire for limitation rather than a desire for expansion, no true face can emerge.

Audre Lorde

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

Audre Lorde

I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic

Audre Lorde

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

Audre Lorde

You are the one that you are looking for.

Audre Lorde

The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.

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.

Audre Lorde

And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.

Audre Lorde

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.

Audre Lorde

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.

Audre Lorde

As a Black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend everybody’s comfortable prejudices of who I should be.

Audre Lorde

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

Audre Lorde

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.

Audre Lorde

In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.

Audre Lorde

The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.

Audre Lorde

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

Audre Lorde

Rape is not aggressive sexuality, it is sexualized aggression.

Audre Lorde

We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not lie to ourselves. We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about—survival and growth.

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.

Audre Lorde

If you conquer the bread problem, that gives you at least a chance to look around at the others.

Audre Lorde

Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex.

Audre Lorde

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

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.

Audre Lorde

Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.

Audre Lorde

What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman’s face? What woman’s terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?

Audre Lorde

She taught me that women who want without needing are expensive and sometimes wasteful, but women who need without wanting are dangerous – they suck you in and pretend not to notice.

Audre Lorde

…oppression is as American as apple pie…

Audre Lorde

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

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

Audre Lorde

Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.

Audre Lorde

I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.

Audre Lorde

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

Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.

Audre Lorde

Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity.

Audre Lorde

When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn’t matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.

Audre Lorde

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

Audre Lorde

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

Audre Lorde

Rationality is not unnecessary. It serves the chaos of knowledge. It serves feeling. It serves to get from this place to that place. But if you don’t honor those places, then the road is meaningless. Too often, that’s what happens with the worship of rationality and that circular, academic, analytic thinking. But ultimately, I don’t see feel/think as a dichotomy. I see them as a choice of ways and combinations.

Audre Lorde

If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest.

Audre Lorde

Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.

Audre Lorde

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

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.

Audre Lorde

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.

Audre Lorde

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.

Audre Lorde

We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we’ve done it.

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.

Audre Lorde

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.

Audre Lorde

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

Audre Lorde

Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.

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

Audre Lorde

No woman is responsible for altering the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman.

Audre Lorde

You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for. This is the way genuine learning takes place. That’s a very difficult way to live, but it also has served me. It’s been an asset as well as a liability.

Audre Lorde

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.

Audre Lorde

What woman here is so enamoured of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman’s face? What woman’s terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous away from the cold winds of self scrutiny? … We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt.

Audre Lorde

I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.

Audre Lorde

I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

Audre Lorde

Once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy.

Audre Lorde

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.

Audre Lorde

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

Audre Lorde

If I do not bring all of who I am to whatever I do, then I bring nothing, or nothing of lasting worth, for I have withheld my essence.

Audre Lorde

But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.

Audre Lorde

Always in the middle of our bloodiest battles you lay down your arms like flowering mines to conqueror me home,

Audre Lorde

We cannot love ‘our people’ unless we love each of us ourselves, unless I love each piece of myself, those I wish to keep and those I wish to change—for survival is the ability to encompass difference, to encompass change without destruction.

Audre Lorde

Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.

Audre Lorde

I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t.

Audre Lorde

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?

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.

Audre Lorde

I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or chisel to remind you of your me-ness as I discover you in myself.

Audre Lorde

As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become “other,” the outsider whose experience and tradition is too “alien” to comprehend.

Audre Lorde

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

For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

Audre Lorde

Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all.

Audre Lorde

Feminism Archives - Big Hive Mind

Audre Lorde Quotes From Feminism To Self Care