Quotes from Audre Lorde

We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we've done it.

I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do.

Hopefully, we can learn from the 60s that we cannot afford to do our enemies work by destroying each other.

Anger is loaded with information and energy.

Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action.

My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I'm going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity.

It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

But the question is a matter of the survival and the teaching. That's what our work comes down to. No matter where we key into it, it's the same work, just different pieces of ourselves doing it.

The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.

It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.

what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority

Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.

Art is not living. It is the use of living. The artist has the ability to take the living and use it in a certain way and produce art.

Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.

Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.

The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference

Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.

The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.

...my experience with people who tried to label me was that they usually did it to either dismiss me or use me.

If you don't define yourself for yourself then you will be crushed into other's fantasies of you and eaten alive

The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.

Afraid is a country with no exit visas.