Audre Lorde quotes - page 2

Audre Lorde was an American writer, poet, and activist, known for her powerful voice on civil rights, feminism, and LGBTQ+ issues. Her works explored the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and social justice. She inspired generations to embrace their identities and fight for equality. Here are 108 of her quotes:

When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I'm not excluding you from the joining - I'm broadening the joining. (Audre Lorde)

There is a timbre of voice that comes from not being heard and knowing / you are not being heard / noticed only by others / not heard for the same reason.

Audre Lorde

What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face? What woman's terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?

Audre Lorde

When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.

Audre Lorde

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

Audre Lorde

There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

Audre Lorde

Without community, there is no liberation.

Audre Lorde

I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't.

Audre Lorde

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.

Audre Lorde

In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.

Audre Lorde

Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless. (Audre Lorde)

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.

Audre Lorde

Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.

Audre Lorde

For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

Audre Lorde

There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.

Audre Lorde

Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

Audre Lorde

Our visions begin with our desires.

Audre Lorde

Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.

Audre Lorde

The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.

Audre Lorde

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.

Audre Lorde

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

...and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.

Audre Lorde

Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs.

Audre Lorde

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence.

Audre Lorde

I am my best work - a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.

Audre Lorde

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Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde - Image

Photo: K. Kendall, CC BY 2.0

Occupation: American Writer
Born: February 18, 1934
Died: November 17, 1992
Quotes count: 108
Wikipedia: Audre Lorde

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