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Audre Lorde

165 quotes

“Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar. I have tried to learn my anger’s usefulness to me, as well as its limitations.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The strength of women lies in recognizing differences between us as creative, and in standing to those distortions which we inherited without blame, but which are now ours to alter. The angers of women can transform difference through insight into power. For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Guilt is only another form of objectification.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Malcolm X is a distinct shape in a very pivotal period of my life. I stand here now — Black, Lesbian, Feminist — an inheritor of Malcolm and in his tradition, doing my work, and the ghost of his voice through my mouth asks each one of you here tonight: Are you doing yours?”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our own living.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was one of the ones who didn’t really hear Malcolm’s voice until it was amplified by death. I had been guilty of what many of us are still guilty of — letting the media, and I don’t mean only the white media — define the bearers of those messages most important to our lives. When I read Malcolm X with careful attention, I found a man much closer to the complexities of real change than anything I had read before.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the most basic Black survival skills is the ability to change, to metabolize experience, good or ill, into something that is useful, lasting, effective. Four hundred years of survival as an endangered species has taught most of us that if we intend to live, we had better become fast learners.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We do not have to live the same mistakes over again if we can look at them, learn from them, and build upon them.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The 60s for me was a time of promise and excitement, but the 60s was also a time of isolation and frustration from within. [...] It was a time of great hope and great expectation; it was also a time of great waste. That is history. We do not need to repeat these mistakes in the 80s.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present. We do not have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding. We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not to lie to ourselves. We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about — survival and growth.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Within each one of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust. If we are to keep the enormity of the forces aligned against us from establishing a false hierarchy of oppression, we must school ourselves to recognize that any attack against Blacks, any attack against women, is an attack against all of us who recognize that our interests are not being served by the systems we support.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Survival is not a theory.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are women trying to knit a future in a country where an was defeated as subversive legislation. We are Lesbians and gay men who, as the most obvious target of the , are threatened with castration, imprisonment, and death in the streets. And we know that our erasure only paves the way for erasure of other people of Color, of the old, of the poor, of all of those who do not fit that mythic dehumanizing norm. Can we really still afford to be fighting each other?”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us, wherever and however we are standing, in whatever arena we choose.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing neutralizes creativity quicker than tokenism, that false sense of security fed by a myth of individual solutions.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“is always easiest when it is removed, academic.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To search for power within myself means I must be willing to move through being afraid to whatever lies beyond. If I look at my most vulnerable places and acknowledge the pain I have felt, I can remove the source of that pain from my enemies’ arsenals. My history cannot be used to feather my enemies’ arrows then, and that lessens their power over me. Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Survival is the greatest gift of love.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Addie Mae Collins, Carol Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair. Four little Black girls, none more than ten years of age, singing their last autumn song in a Sunday church school in . After the explosion clears it is not possible to tell which patent leather Sunday shoe belongs to which found leg.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The power to kill is less than the power to create, for it produces an ending rather than the beginning of something new.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anger — a passion of displeasure that may be excessive or misplaced but not necessarily harmful. Hatred — an emotional habit or attitude of mind in which aversion is coupled with ill will. Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Growing up, metabolizing hatred like a daily bread. Because I am Black, because I am woman, because I am not Black enough, because I am not some particular fantasy of a woman, because I AM. On such a consistent diet, one can eventually come to value the hatred of one’s enemies more than one values the love of friends, for that hatred becomes the source of anger, and anger is a powerful fuel.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes it seems that anger alone keeps me alive; it burns with a bright and undiminished flame. Yet anger, like guilt, is an incomplete form of human knowledge. More useful than hatred, but still limited. Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but in the long run, strength that is bred by anger alone is a blind force which cannot create the future. It can only demolish the past. Such strength does not focus upon what lies ahead, but upon what lies behind, upon what created it — hatred. And hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To grow up metabolizing hatred like daily bread means that eventually every human interaction becomes tainted with the negative passion and intensity of its by-products — anger and cruelty.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We do not love ourselves, therefore we cannot love each other. Because we see in each other’s face our own face, the face we never stopped wanting. Because we survived and survival breeds desire for more self. A face we never stopped wanting at the same time as we try to obliterate it.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We had to metabolize such hatred that our cells have learned to live upon it because we had to, or die of it. Old King Mithridates learned to eat arsenic bit by bit and so outwitted his poisoners, but I’d have hated to kiss him upon his lips! Now we deny such hatred ever existed because we have learned to neutralize it through ourselves, and the catabolic process throws off waste products of fury even when we love.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With the constant manipulation of the media, many Black americans are honestly confused, defending “our” invasion of Black Grenada under a mistaken mirage of patriotism. Nineteen eighty-four is upon us, and doublethink has come home to scramble our brains and blanket our protest.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In addition to being a demonstration to the Caribbean community of what will happen to any country that dares to assume responsibility for its own destiny, the invasion of Grenada also serves as a naked warning to thirty million African-americans. Watch your step. We did it to them down there and we will not hesitate to do it to you.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Weeks after the invasion, Grenadians were still smelling out and burying bodies which lay all over the island. The true casualty figures will never be known. No civilian body count is available. Even the bodies of Maurice Bishop and his slain ministers are never positively identified, no doubt to forestall any possible enshrinement by the people who loved him, no doubt to make the task of smearing his popular memory more easily accomplished. It has already begun.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough. We were different. Being Black together was not enough. We were different. Being Black women together was not enough. We were different. Being Black dykes together was not enough. We were different.Each of us had our own needs and pursuits, and many different alliances. Self-preservation warned some of us that we could not afford to settle for one easy definition, one narrow individuation of self. At the Bag, at Hunter College, uptown in Harlem, at the library, there was a piece of the real me bound in each place, and growing.It was a while before we came to realize that our place was the very house of difference rather the security of any one particular difference.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, “Beautiful and tough as chestnut/stanchions against our nightmare of weakness” and of impotence. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. 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 (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare. If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core — the fountain — of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear — fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live. Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight, and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our Blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson — that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth. And it is never without fear — of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective. 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. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The distortion of relationship which says “I disagree with you, so I must destroy you” leaves us as Black people with basically uncreative victories, defeated in any common struggle. This jugular vein psychology is based on the fallacy that your assertion or affirmation of self is an attack upon my self — or that my defining myself will somehow prevent or retard your self-definition. The supposition that one sex needs the other’s acquiescence in order to exist prevents both from moving together as self-defined persons toward a common goal. 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.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual’s. But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was more than pain. The horror, the enormity of what was happening. Not just the death of King, but what it meant. I have always had the sense of Armageddon and it was much stronger in those days, the sense of living on the edge of chaos. Not just personally, but on the world level. That we were dying, that we were killing our world — that sense had always been with me. That whatever I was doing, whatever we were doing that was creative and right, functioned to hold us from going over the edge. That this was the most we could do while we constructed some saner future. But that we were in that kind of peril. And here it was reality, in fact.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The form our creativity takes is often a class issue. Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one’s own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time. The actual requirements to produce the visual arts also help determine, along class lines, whose art is whose. In this day of inflated prices for material, who are our sculptors, our painters, our photographers? When we speak of a broadly based women’s culture, we need to be aware of the effect of class and economic differences on the supplies available for producing art.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As we move toward creating a society within which we can each flourish, ageism is another distortion of relationship which interferes without vision. By ignoring the past, we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes. The “generation gap” is an important social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memories of the community, nor ask the all important question, “Why?” This gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread. We find ourselves having to repeat and relearn the same old lessons over and over that our mothers did because we do not pass on what we have learned, or because we are unable to listen.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The threat of difference has been no less blinding to people of Color. Those of us who are Black must see that the reality of our lives and our struggle does not make us immune to the errors of ignoring and misnaming difference. Within Black communities where racism is a living reality, differences among us often seem dangerous and suspect. The need for unity is often misnamed as a need for homogeneity, and a Black feminist vision mistaken for betrayal of our common interests as a people. Because of the continuous battle against racial erasure that Black women and Black men share, some Black women still refuse to recognize that we are also oppressed as women, and that sexual hostility against Black women is practiced not only by the white racist society, but implemented within our Black communities as well. It is a disease striking the heart of Black nationhood, and silence will not make it disappear. Exacerbated by racism and the pressures of powerlessness, violence against Black women and children often becomes a standard within our communities, one by which manliness can be measured. But these woman-hating acts are rarely discussed as crimes against Black women.”
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) said by 1992 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source