Quotes from Audre Lorde

Yet anger, like guilt, is an incomplete form of human knowledge. More useful than hatred, but still limited. Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but in the long run, strength that is bred by anger along is a blind force that cannot create the future. It can only demolish the past.

How is the systematic erosion of freedoms gradually accomplished? What kind of gradual erosion of our status as United States citizens will Black people be persuaded first to ignore and then to accept?

feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men.

It is sometimes both the curse and the blessing of the poet to perceive without yet being able to order those perceptions, and that is another name for Chaos.

within those differences, we can join together to effect a future the world has not yet conceived, let alone seen.

When patriarchy dismisses us, it encourages our murderers.

Of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger.

The generation gap is an important social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memory of the community, nor ask the all important question, Why? This gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread.

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.

As Kalamu ya Salaam, a Black male writer points out, "As long as male domination exists, rape will exist. Only women revolting and men made conscious of their responsibility to fight sexism can collectively stop rape.

The need for unity is often misnamed as a need for homogeneity

Rather than the idyllic picture created by false nostalgia, the fifties were really straight white america's cooling-off period of "let's pretend we're happy and that this is the best of all possible worlds and we'll blow those nasty commies to hell if they dare to say otherwise.

Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity.

But this is all about how very difficult it is at times for people to see who or what they are looking at, particularly when they don't want to.

If the problems of Black women are only derivatives of a larger contradiction between capital and labor, then so is racism, and both must be fought by all of us. The capitalist structure is a many-headed monster. I might add here that in no socialist country that I have visited have I found an absence of racism or of sexism, so the eradication of both of these diseases seems to involve more than the abolition of capitalism as an institution.

Muriel and I talked about love as a voluntary commitment, while we each struggled through the steps of an old dance, not consciously learned, but desperately followed. We had learned well in the kitchens of our mothers, both powerful women who did not let go easily. In those warm places of survival, love was another name for control, however openly given

For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt – of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7 a.m., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead – while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths.

We have chosen each other and the edge of each others battles the war is the same if we lose someday women's blood will congeal upon a dead planet if we win there is no telling we seek beyond history for a new and more possible meeting.

I don't believe this shift from conquering problems to experiencing life is a one-generational shot or a single investment. I believe it's a whole signature which you try to set in motion and have some input into. But I'm not saying that women don't think or analyze. Or that white does not feel. I'm saying that we must never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy...

This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.

And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.

For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.

Being out of work brought a lot of new and starkly instructive experiences.

We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society.