Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde
Audre Lordewas an African American writer, feminist, womanist, lesbian, and civil rights activist. As a poet, she is best known for technical mastery and emotional expression, particularly in her poems expressing anger and outrage at civil and social injustices she observed throughout her life. Her poems and prose largely dealt with issues related to civil rights, feminism, and the exploration of black female identity. In relation to white feminists in the United States, Lorde famously said, “the master's tools will...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth18 February 1934
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Audre Lorde quotes about
Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.
Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. it is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely toleration, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within the interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters
For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, beautiful and tough as chestnut stanchions against our nightmare of weakness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling
The speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.
When I use my strength in the service of my vision it makes no difference whether or not I am afraid.
In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.
Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.
One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.
My fear of anger taught me nothing.
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.
Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.
I have suckled the wolf's lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter.
As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom from oppression, 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. But this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live.
Hatred is a death wish for the hated, not a life wish for anything else.