Audre Lorde Quotes

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.

We have too often been expected to speak
all things to all people and speak everyone else's position
but our own.

African tradition deals with life as an experience to be lived. In many respects, it is much like the Eastern philosophies in that we see ourselves as a part of a life force; we are joined, for instance, to the air, to the earth. We are part of the whole-life process. We live in accordance with, in a kind of correspondence with the rest of the world as a whole. And therefore living becomes an experience, rather than a problem, no matter how bad or how painful it may be.

There are lesbians, God knows ... if you came up through lesbian circles in the forties and fifties in New York ... who were not feminist and would not call themselves feminists.

The linkage of passion to dominance/subordination is the prototype of the heterosexual image of male-female relationships, one which justifies pornography. Women are supposed to love being brutalized. This is also the prototypical justification of all relationships of oppression - that the subordinate one who is "different" enjoys the inferior position.

I wasn't cute or passive enough to be "femme," and I wasn't mean or tough enough to be "butch." I was given a wide berth. Non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community.

Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer.

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.

It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.

Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women.

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.

Your silence will not protect you.

I am
the sun and moon and forever hungry
the sharpened edge
where day and night shall meet
and not be
one.

from "From the House of Yemanjá,

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.

To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society

How are you practicing what you preach - whatever you preach, and who is exactly listening?

One thing has always kept me going - and it's not really courage or bravery, unless that's what courage or bravery is made of - is that sense that there are so many ways in which I'm vulnerable and cannot help but be vulnerable, I'm not going to be more vulnerable by putting weapons of silence in my enemies' hands. Being an open lesbian in the Black community is not easy, although being closeted is even harder.

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

Our visions begin with our desires.

Out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that knows
comes the shape I am seeking for reason.

Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideasl The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves
along with the renewed courage to try them out.

I have found that battling despair does not mean closing my eyes to the enormity of the tasks of effecting change, nor ignoring the strength and the barbarity of the forces aligned against us. It means teaching, surviving and fighting with the most important resource I have, myself, and taking joy in that battle. It means, for me, recognizing the enemy outside, and the enemy within, and knowing that my work is part of a continuum of women's work, of reclaiming this earth and our power, and knowing that this work did not begin with my birth nor will it end with my death. And it means knowing that within this continuum, my life and my love and my work has particular power and meaning relative to others.

Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us?

[…] your smile has been to war

If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister's oppression and she calls me on it, to answer her anger with my own only blankets the substance of our exchange with reaction. It wastes energy. And yes, it is very difficult to stand still and to listen to another woman's voice delineate an agony I do not share, or one to which I myself have contributed.

In other words, I would be giving in to a myth of sameness which I think can destroy us.

I know certainly, for instance, it's part of the black aesthetic, the whole concept of art as business, art for art's sake, art as the competitive gesture, I connect with a very male-oriented concept of living, as opposed to, and we would call them alternate aesthetics, which include the black aesthetic, the feminist aesthetic, where art and poetry become part and parcel of one's daily living, one's daily expression, the need to communicate, the need to share one's feelings, to develop within oneself the best that is possible. And the definition of art as betterment, I think, is a mainstay of the alternative aesthetics.

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.

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.

To acknowledge privilege is the first step in making it available for wider use. Each of us is blessed in some particular way, whether we recognize our blessings or not.

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.

The peoples of the Soviet Union, in many respects, impress me as people who can not yet afford to be honest. When they can be they will either blossom into a marvel or sink into decay. What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope. I think that in America there are certain kinds of problems and in Russia there are certain kinds of problems, but basically, when you find people who start from a position where human beings are at the core, as opposed to a position where profit is at the core, the solutions can be very different. I wonder how similar human problems will be solved. But I am not always convinced that human beings are at the core here, either, although there is more lip service done to that idea than in the U.S.

Once it was easy to know who were my people...

I do not believe our wants have made all our lies holy.

We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society.

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

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

Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures.

Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us, wherever and however we are standing, in whatever arena we choose.

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.

I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side

Silence has never brought us anything of worth.

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

Hatred is a death wish for the hated, not a life wish for anything else.

When you read the words of Langston Hughes you are reading the words of a Black Gay man. When you read the words of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Angelina Weld Grimké, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, you are reading the words of Black Lesbians. When you listen to the life-affirming voices of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, you are hearing Black Lesbian women. When you see the plays and read the words of Lorraine Hansberry, you are reading the words of a women who loved women deeply.

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

I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.

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.

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

To face the realities of our lives is not a reason for despair-despair is a tool of your enemies. Facing the realities of our lives gives us motivation for action. For you are not powerless ... You know why the hard questions must be asked. It is not altruism, it is self-preservation-survival.

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.

The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference ...

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.

There are many kinds of open ... Love is a word, another kind of open ... Take my word for jewel in your open light.

Silence and invisibility go hand in hand with powerlessness ...

You need to reach down and touch the thing that's boiling inside of you and make it somehow useful.

When there is no connection at all between people, then anger is a way of bringing them closer together, of making contact. But when there is a great deal of connectedness that is problematic or threatening or unacknowledged, then anger is a way of keeping people separate, of putting distance between us.

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.

I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.

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

Within the lesbian community I am Black, and within the Black community I am a lesbian. Any attack against Black people is a lesbian and gay issue, because I and thousands of other Black women are part of the lesbian community. Any attack against lesbians and gays is a Black issue, because thousands of lesbians and gay men are Black. There is no hierarchy of oppression.

But support will always have a special and vividly erotic set of image/meanings for me now, one of which is floating upon a sea within a ring of women like warm bubbles keeping me afloat upon the surface of that sea. I can feel the texture of inviting water just beneath their eyes, and do not fear it. It is the sweet smell of their breath and laughter and voices calling my name that gives me volition, helps me remember I want to turn away from looking down. These images flow quickly, the tangible floods of energy rolling off these women toward me that I converted into power to heal myself.

I wanted to write in my journal but couldn't bring myself to. There are so many shades to what passed through me in those days. And I would shrink from committing myself to paper because the light would change before the word was out, the ink was dry.

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.

As a living creature I am part of two kinds of forces- growth and decay, sprouting and withering, living and dying- and at any given moment of our lives, each one of us is actively located somewhere along a continuum between these two forces.

It is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.

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.

The tensions created inside me by the contradictions is another source of energy and learning. I have always known I learn my most lasting lessons about difference by closely attending the ways in which the differences inside me lie down together.

Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.

How hard it is to sleep
in the middle of life.

If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they probably will not survive.

As we come to know, accept, and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas-the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.

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.

For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.

Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.

We learn to work when we are tired, so we can learn to work when we are afraid.

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

Art is not living. It is a use of living. The artist has the ability to take that living and use it in a certain way, and produce art.

We are powerful because we have survived

But, on the other hand, I get bored with racism too and recognize that there are still many things to be said about a Black person and a White person loving each other in a racist society.

What makes her eyes slide o of mine? What does she see that angers her so, or infuriates her, or disgusts her? Why do I want to break her face o where her eyes do not meet mine? Why does she wear my sister's face? My daughter's mouth turned down about to suck itself in? The eyes of a furious and rejected lover? Why do I dream I cradle you at night? Divide your limbs between the food bowls of my least favorite animals? Keep vigil to you night after terrible night, wondering? Oh sister, where is that dark rich land we wanted to wander through together? ... [W]hose future image have we destroyed
your face or mine
without either how shall I look again at both
lacking either is lacking myself.

I am my best work - a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.

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

Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.

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.

Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action.

Much of the gay white movement seeks to be included in the american dream and is angered when they do not receive the standard white male privileges, misnamed as "american democracy". Often, white gay men are working not to change the system. This is one the reasons why the gay male movement is as white as it is. Black gay men recognize, again by the facts of survival, that being Black, they are not going to be included in the same way.

If you come as softly As wind within the trees You may hear what I hear See what sorrow sees. If you come as lightly As threading dew I will take you gladly Nor ask more of you. You may sit beside me Silent as a breath Only those who stay dead Shall remember death. And if you come I will be silent Nor speak harsh words to you. I will not ask you why, now. Or how, or what you do. We shall sit here, softly Beneath two different years And the rich earth between us Shall drink our tears.

Survival is not a theory. In what way do I contribute to the subjugation of any part of those who I define as my people? Insight must illuminate the particulars of our lives: who labors to make the bread we waste, or the energy it takes to make nuclear poisons which will not biodegrade for one thousand years; or who goes blind assembling the microtransistors in our inexpensive calculators?

If I ever really sounded
I would rupture
your eardrums
or your heart.

I write for these 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 will save us, but it won't.

Places do not change so much as what we seek in them

How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live
unblinded?
How much of this pain
can I use?

For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection, which is so feared by a patriarchal world ...

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

What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face?

There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.

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.

See me now
your severed daughter
laughing our name into echo
all the world shall remember

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.

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.