Quotes from Audre Lorde

I cannot shut you out the way I shut the others out, so maybe I can destroy you. Must destroy you?

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope.

Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all.

Dark-bright fire lit eyes

There is an important difference between openness and naïveté. Not everyone has good intentions nor means me well. I remind myself I do not need to change these people, only recognize who they are.

It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.

How hard it is to sleep in the middle of life.

I forgot what we were celebrating. Because we were always celebrating something, a new job, a new poem, a new love, a new dream.

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. I have never been able to blind myself to that cruelty, which according to one popular definition of mental health, makes me mentally unhealthy.

Each one of us had been starved for love for so long that we wanted to believe that love, once found, was all-powerful. We wanted to believe that it could give word to my inchoate pain and rages; that it could enable Muriel to face the world and get a job; that it could free our writings, cure racism, end homophobia and adolescent acne.

Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to bed at night.

To go to bed and to wake up again day afte day besides a woman, to lie in bed with our arms around each other and drift in and out of sleep, to be with each other not as a quick stolen pleasure, nor as a wild treat but like sunlight, day after day in the regualr course of our lives. I was discovering all the ways that love creeps into life when two selves exist closely, when two women meet.

We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.

I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

What better way is there to police the streets of a minority community than to turn one generation against the other?

may I never lose that terror that keeps me brave

There are many kinds of open. . . Love is a word, another kind of open. . . Take my word for jewel in your open light.

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.

I want to write rage but all that comes is sadness. We have been sad long enough to make this earth either weep or grow fertile. I am an anachronism, a sport, like the bee that was never meant to fly. Science said so. I am not supposed to exist. I carry death around in my body like a condemnation. But I do live. The bee flies. There must be some way to integrate death into living, neither ignoring it nor giving in to it.

The Seventh Sense Women who build nations learn to love men who build nations learn to love children building sand castles by the rising sea

I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic

And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.

If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. (From Poetry is Not a Luxury)