100 Inspirational Quotes By Audre Lorde, The Author Of Zami
Your silence will not protect you.
If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.
When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
And when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house
Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.
Revolution is not a one time event.
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.
But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.
I am my best work - a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.
I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.
Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
Without community, there is no liberation.
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.
Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing.
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care.
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.
...and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.
I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
...oppression is as American as apple pie...
I soon discovered that if you keep your mouth shut, people are apt to believe you know everything, and they begin to feel freer and freer to tell you anything, anxious to show that they know something, too.
