Quotes from Audre Lorde

I did not recognize the shape of my own name.

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.

For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid.

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.

And I knew when I entered her I was high wind in her forests hollow fingers whispering sound honey flowed from the split cup impaled on a lance of tongues on the tips of her breasts on her navel and my breath howling into her entrances through lungs of pain.

Fair, fair, what's fair, you think? Is fair you want, look in god's face.' My mother was busily dropping onions into the tin. She paused, and turning around, held my puffy face up, her hand beneath my chin. Her eyes so sharp and furious before, now just looked tired and sad.

sometimes at noon I dream there is nothing to fear

Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me— so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins. Another meeting

But in this plastic, anti-human society in which we live, there have never been too many people buying fat Black girls born almost blind and ambidextrous, gay or straight.

This new century arrived and we saw death, generational death, peeling our skins down to our blood plasma. And I asked you question after question, distracted by the scandal of billionaires accessorizing their flesh with newly minted coins. Where are we on this food chain of life to be eaten so easily century after century, decade after decade? Are

I am who I am doing what I came to do.

Even for years afterward white people would stop me on the street or particularly in Central Park and ask if I was Odetta, a Black folksinger whom I did not resemble at all except that we were both big Black beautiful women with natural heads.

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.

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

Audre Lorde's writing is an impulse toward wholeness. What she says and how she says it engages us both emotionally and intellectually.

She saw clearly that she could both love her son fiercely and let him go. In fact, for their mutual survival, she had no choice but to let him go, to teach him that she "did not exist to do his feeling for him."5

Toni did not speak English and I didn't speak Russian, but I felt as if we were making love that last night through our interpreters. I still don't know if she knew what was going on or not, but I suspect that she did.

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.

The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

I thought it'd be easier here, myself, to live like I wanted to, say what I wanted to say, but it isn't. It's just easier not to, that's all.

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?

Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly "inferior" capacity to feel deeply.

Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else's words.

Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction.