Audre Lorde Quotes

189 quotes in 2162 categories

• If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest.
• Raising Black children-female and male-in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the…
• Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer.
• Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.
• Silence has never brought us anything of worth.
• ‎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…
• I am still learning - how to take joy in all the people I am, how to use all my selves in the service of…
• For we have built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression and these must be altered at the…
• Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged... We have been taught to either ignore our differences or to…
• Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge. They are chaotic, sometimes painful, sometimes contradictory, but they come from deep within us. And we…
• There are many lesbians and gay men trapped by their fear into silence and invisibility, and they exist in a dim valley of terror wearing…
• 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…
• 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…
• Every woman I have ever known has made a lasting impression on my soul.
• I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness…
• I am a reflection of my mother’s secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers
• 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…
• 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 -…
• If you can't change reality, change your perceptions of it.
• What I leave behind has a life of its own.

Browse Audre Lorde Quotes by Category