Quotes from Audre Lorde

The linkage of passion to dominance/subordination is the prototype of the heterosexual image of male-female relationships, one which justifies pornography. Women are supposed to love being brutalized. This is also the prototypical justification of all relationships of oppression—that the subordinate one who is "different" enjoys the inferior position.

Anger is loaded with information and energy.

Prosthesis offers the empty comfort of "Nobody will know the difference." But it is that very difference which I wish to affirm, because I have lived it, and survived it, and wish to share that strength with other women.

Is it any coincidence that the plastic surgeons most interested in pushing breast reconstruction and most involved in the superficial aspects of women's breasts speak the language of sexist pigs?

The subject of revolution is ourselves, is our lives.

We can learn to mother ourselves.

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism.

this action was a kind of shift from safety towards self-preservation. It was a choice of pains. That's what living was all about.

the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.

I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.

Within the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle and otherwise, conscious or not - I am not only a casuality, I am also a warrior.

When patriarchy dismisses us, it encourages our murderers. When radical lesbian feminist theory dismisses us, it encourages its own demise.

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.

I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die.

Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

I lost my sister, Gennie, to my silence and her pain and despair, to both our angers and to a world's cruelty that destroys its own young in passing—not even as a rebel gesture or sacrifice or hope for another living of the spirit, but out of not noticing or caring about the destruction.

Zami. A Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers.

said Gennie was in the hospital because she had swallowed poison, by accident. Iodine, from the medicine chest. "But what kind of house is that for a young girl to grow up in? How could she make such a mistake, poor thing? Wasn't her stepmother home?

Much of western european history conditions us to see human differences in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/inferior. In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior.

The old sexual power relationships based on a dominant/subordinate model between unequals have not served us as a people, nor as individuals.

We had bought two dozen capsules on Friday.

For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men.

Enforced sterilization and unavailable abortions are tools of oppression against Black women, as is rape.