Quotes from Audre Lorde

Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.

I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.

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

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

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.

I am a reflection of my mother's secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers

. . . 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.

Poetry is not a luxury.

The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

We are all in the process of becoming.

If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.

I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.

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

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

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house

I seek no favor untouched by blood.

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.

I am still learning - how to take joy in all the people I am, how to use all my selves in the service of what I believe, how to accept when I fail and rejoice when I succeed.

Learning not to crumple before these uncertainties fuels my resolve to print myself upon the texture of each day fully rather than forever.

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

It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we'll make it.

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.

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.