Quotessence
Home / Authors / Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde Quotes

Writer

Filter quotes by topic

AllFeminismIfsSilenceBlackLiteratureDifferencesOppressionFearSpeakWay

Famous Audre Lorde Quotes

“As women, we have been taught either to 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. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist. Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others 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 them strengths. For 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 enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

CommunityFeminismOppressionLiberationDifference
Book:Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Create image

“I have suckled the wolf's lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire when there was no fire, no food, no sisters, no quarter. We are not goddesses or matriarchs or edifices of forgiveness; we are not fiery fingers of judgement or instruments of flagellation; we are women forced back always upon our woman's power.”

FeminismForgivenessOppression
Book:Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Create image

“Well, women with breast cancer are warriors, also. I have been to war, and still am. So has every woman who had had one or both breasts amputated because of the cancer that is becoming the primary physical scourge of our time. For me, my scars are an honorable reminder that I may be a casualty in the cosmic war against radiation, animal fat, air pollution, McDonald’s hamburgers and Red Dye No. 2, but the fight is still going on, and I am still a part of it. I refuse to have my scars hidden or trivialized behind lambswool or silicone gel. I refuse to be reduced in my own eyes or in the eyes of others from warrior to mere victim, simply because it might render me a fraction more acceptable or less dangerous to the still complacent, those who believe if you cover up a problem it ceases to exist. I refuse to hide my body simply because it might make a woman-phobic world more comfortable.”

WomenPowerFeminismCancerBreast CancerMastectomy
Book:The Cancer Journals
Create image

“And that anger, as we know from our flayed egos of childhood, is armed with a powerful cruelty learned in the bleakness of the too-early battles for survival. 'You can't take it, huh!' The Dozens. A Black game of supposedly friendly rivalry and name calling; in reality, a crucial exercise in learning how to absorb verbal abuse without faltering.”

RaceChildhoodAfrican AmericanBullying
Book:Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Create image

“A Litany for Survival For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision crucial and alone for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice who love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward at once before and after seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children's mouths so their dreams will not reflect the death of ours: For those of us who were imprinted with fear like a faint line in the center of our foreheads learning to be afraid with our mother's milk for by this weapon this illusion of some safety to be found the heavy-footed hoped to silence us For all of us this instant and this triumph We were never meant to survive. And when the sun rises we are afraid it might not remain when the sun sets we are afraid it might not rise in the morning when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion when our stomachs are empty we are afraid we may never eat again when we are loved we are afraid love will vanish when we are alone we are afraid love will never return and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.”

LifePoetryFearSilenceSpeaking Out
Book:The Black Unicorn: Poems
Create image

“Institutionalized rejection of difference 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 difference 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. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.”

CapitalismProfitRejectionOutsidersDifferenceDifferences Between PeopleInstitutionalized
Book:Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Create image

“Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that is is the task of women of Color to educated white women - in the face of tremendous resistance - as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.”

EducationIgnoranceOppressionSexismWhite Feminism
Book:Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Create image

“On the other hand, white women face the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power. This possibility does not exist in the same way for women of Color. The tokenism that is sometimes extended to us is not an invitation to join power; our racial "otherness" is a visible reality that makes that quite clear. For white women there is a wider range of pretended choices and rewards for identifying with patriarchal power and its tools. Today, with the defeat of ERA, the tightening economy, and increased conservatism, it is easier once again for white women to believe the dangerous fantasy that if you are good enough, pretty enough, sweet enough, quiet enough, teach the children to behave, hate the right people, and marry the right men, then you will be allowed to co-exist with patriarchy in relative peace, at least until a man needs your job or the neighborhood rapist happens along. And true, unless one lives and loves in the trenches it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless. But Black women and our children know the fabric of our lives is stitched with violence and with hatred, that there is no rest. We do not deal with it only on the picket lines, or in dark midnight alleys, or in the places where we dare to verbalize our resistance. For us, increasingly, violence weaves through the daily tissues of our living — in the supermarket, in the classroom, in the elevator, in the clinic and the schoolyard, from the plumber, the baker, the saleswoman, the bus driver, the bank teller, the waitress who does not serve us.”

RaceWhite FeminismBlack Feminism
Author:Audre Lorde
Create image

“There is so much false spirituality around us these days, calling itself goddess-worship or "the way." It is false because too cheaply bought and little understood, but most of all because it does not lend, but rather saps, that energy we need to do our work. So when an example of the real power of healing love comes along such as this one, it is difficult to use the same words to talk about it because so many of our best and most erotic words have been so cheapened. Perhaps I can say this all more simply; I say the love of women healed me.”

LoveSpiritualityHealingFeminismSisterhoodWomanism
Book:The Cancer Journals
Create image

“The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need—the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment.”

EroticSystemic OppressionAudre Lorde
Book:Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power
Create image

“This kind of action is a prevalent error among oppressed peoples. It is based upon the false notion that there is only a limited and particular amount of freedom that must be divided up between us, with the largest and juiciest pieces of liberty going as spoils to the victor or the stronger. So instead of joining together to fight for more, we quarrel between ourselves for a larger slice of the one pie. Black women fight between ourselves over men, instead of pursuing and using who we are and our strengths for lasting change; Black women and men fight between ourselves over who has more of a right to freedom, instead of seeing each other's struggles as part of our own and vital to our common goals; Black and white women fight between ourselves over who is the more oppressed, instead of seeing those areas in which our causes are the same. (Of course, this last separation is worsened by the intransigent racism that white women too often fail to, or cannot, address in themselves.)”

FreedomOppressionZero Sum Game
Book:Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Create image

“We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. For the demands of our released expectations lead us inevitably into actions which will help bring our lives into accordance with our needs, our knowledge, our desires. And the fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect, keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, and leads us to settle for or accept many facets of our oppression as women.”

Women S StrengthWomen S Freedom
Book:Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power
Create image

“On the table behind the built-in bar stood opened bottles of gin, bourbon, scotch, soda, and other various mixers. The bar itself was covered with little delicacies of all descriptions: chips, dips, and little crackers and squares of bread laced with the usual dabs of egg salad and sardine paste. There was a platter of delicious fried chicken wings and a pan of potato-and-egg salad dressed with vinegar. Bowls of lives and pickles surrounded the main dishes, along with trays of red crabapples and little sweet onions on toothpicks. But the centerpiece of the whole table was a huge platter of succulent and thinly sliced roast beef set into an underpan of cracked ice. Upon the beige platter each slice of rare meat had been lovingly laid out and individually folded up into a vulval pattern with a tiny dab of mayonnaise at the crucial apex. The pink-brown folded meat around the pale cream-yellow dot formed suggestive sculptures that made a great hit with all the women present. Petey– at whose house the party was being given and the creator of the meat sculptures– smilingly acknowledged the many compliments on her platter with a long-necked graceful nod of her elegant dancer’s head.”

LesbianGay And LesbianLgbt HistoryLesbian History
Book:Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
Create image

“Castaneda talks of living with death as your guide, that sharp awareness engendered by the full possibility of any given chance and moment. For me, that means being—not ready for death—but able to get ready instantly, and always to balance the "I wants" with the "I haves." I am learning to speak my pieces, to inject into the living world my convictions of what is necessary and what I think is important without concern (of the enervating kind) for whether or not it is understood, tolerated, correct or heard before. Although of course being incorrect is always the hardest, but even that is becoming less important. The world will not stop if I make a mistake.”

DeathAwarenessBalanceLivingMistakesMortalityConvictionsCarlos Castaneda
Book:The Cancer Journals
Create image

“Like superficial spirituality, looking on the bright side of things is a euphemism used for obscuring certain realities of life, the open consideration of which might prove threatening or dangerous to the status quo. Last week I read a letter from a doctor in a medical magazine which said that no truly happy person ever gets cancer. Despite my knowing better, and despite my having dealt with this blame-the-victim thinking for years, for a moment this letter hit my guilt button. Had I really been guilty of the crime of not being happy in this best of all possible infernos?”

RealityHappinessOptimismShameBlameCancerLooking On The Bright Side
Book:The Cancer Journals
Create image

“In order to be whole, we must recognise the despair oppression plants within each of us — that thin persistent voice that says our efforts are useless, it will never change, so why bother, accept it. And we must fight that inserted piece of self-destruction that lives and flourishes like a poison inside of us, unexamined until it makes us turn upon ourselves in each other.”

JusticeDespairSocial JusticeActivismOppression
Book:Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems
Create image

“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?”

IfsNeedsChildrenFactsHouseDifferencesWhitePoorDealsBehindsFeminismColorTheoryMen And WomenOur ChildrenCleanFeministOppressionYour ChildrenRacistConferencesFeminist Theory
Book:Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Create image

“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.”

GivingIdeasLightFormNamesFeltQualityOur LivesMagicProductsDirectPursueIlluminationNamelessScrutinize
Book:Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Create image

“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. it is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely toleration, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within the interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters”

WorldWayWellsDoeDifferentDifferencesCreativityCreativeOur LivesEqualFunctionMereToleranceDenialFundSparksNew WaysAdvocatingCharterSustenanceTolerationDialecticsPolarity
Author:Audre Lorde
Create image