Quotes from Audre Lorde

I don't know how long I looked for Toni every day at noontime, sitting on the stoop. Eventually, her image receded into that place from which all my dreams are made.

Black. We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present.

There are so many roots to the tree of anger / that sometimes the branches shatter / before they bear.-Audre Lorde Happy Bornday Blessings Audre Lorde

dealing with the role of difference within the lives of american women: difference of race, sexuality, class, and age. The absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political. It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians.

Laten we op zoek gaan naar 'vreugde' in plaats van naar eerlijk voedsel en schone lucht en een gezondere toekomst op een bewoonbare planeet! Alsof geluk volstaat om ons te beschermen tegen de gevolgen van winst-waanzin.

For Black women as well as Black men, it is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others — for their use and to our detriment

Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change... —Audre Lorde, born #otd

For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.

It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us but our refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment.

The image of the Angolan woman with a baby on one arm and a gun in the other is neither romantic nor fanciful

those... who are unclear about the pathways of their own definition...

They convinced me meaning they had dragged her 4'10 Black Woman's frame over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval until she let go the first real power she ever had and lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children.

Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence." —Audre Lorde

The way you get people to testify against themselves is not to have police tactics and oppressive techniques. What you do is to build it in so people learn to distrust everything in themselves that has not been sanctioned, to reject what is most creative in themselves to begin with, so you don't even need to stamp it out.

I am Black, Woman, and Poet—fact, and outside the realm of choice. I can choose only to be or not be, and in various combinations of myself.... all that I am is of who I am, is of what I do. —Audre Lorde, born #OTD in 1934

Om tegen de weersomstandigheden bestand te zijn moesten we steen worden, en nu stoten we ons bont en blauw aan de dichtstbijzijnde ander.

Our labor has become more important than our silence.

when we look at our differences and not allow ourselves to be divided, when we own them and are not divided by them, that is when we will be able to move on.

For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can no require no less ourselves

the assumption that the herstory and myth of white women is the legitimate and sole herstory and myth of all women to call upon for power and background, and that nonwhite women and our herstories are noteworthy only as decorations, or examples of female victimization.

When the desire for definition, self or otherwise, comes out of a desire for limitation rather than a desire for expansion, no true face can emerge.

At the same time we organize behind specific and urgent issues, we must also develop and maintain an ongoing vision, and the theory following upon that vision, of why we struggle—of the shape and taste and philosophy of what we wish to see.

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

Every day of your lives is practice in becoming the person you want to be. No instantaneous miracle is suddenly going to occur and make you brave and courageous and true.