Quotes from Audre Lorde

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 same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself — a Black woman warrior poet doing my work — come to ask you, are you doing yours?

To acknowledge privilege is the first step in making it available for wider use.

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.

How the young attempt and are broken differs from age to age We were brown free girls love singing beneath our skin sun in our hair in our eyes sun our fortune and the wind had made us golden made us gay.

I respect the time I spend each day treating my body, and I consider it part of my political work. It is possible to have some conscious input into our physical processes–not expecting the impossible, but allowing for the unexpected–a kind of training in self-love and physical resistance.

You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for.

Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer. None of these struggles are ever easy, and even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded, because it is so easy not to battle at all, to just accept and call that acceptance inevitable.

When we admit and deal with difference; when we deal with the deep bitterness; when we deal with the horror of even our different nightmares; when we turn them and look at them, it's like looking at death: hard but possible. If you look at it directly without embracing it, then there is much less that you can ever be made to fear.

I sit before the typewriter and nothing comes. If feels as if underlining these assaults, lining them up one after the other and looking at them squarely might give them an unbearable power. Yet, I know that the opposite is true-no matter how difficult it may be to look at the realities of our lives, it is there that we will find the strength to change them. And to suppress any truth is to give it power beyond endurance.

If you conquer the bread problem, that gives you at least a chance to look around at the others.

Women are powerful and dangerous.

One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness. When I develop that sense of awareness, I develop, by extension, a sense concerning you. That does not dictate why my relationship is with you. I may have to fight you, but as soon as I am aware of you, I must relate to you. I must take you in. This is engagement. It is a prerequisite to any kind of love, and it is difficult and necessary.

We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves 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.

Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.

I learned that if I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

The black unicorn was mistaken for a shadow or symbol and taken through a cold country where mist painted mockeries of my fury.

What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and at, tempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?

But I loved her, because she moved like she felt she was somebody special, like she was somebody I'd like to know someday. She moved like how I thought god's mother must have moved, and my mother, once upon a time, and someday maybe me.

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

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.

When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

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

When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences.