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
stoicism and silence does not serve us nor our communities, only the forces of things as they are.
What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?
For within livin structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets.
Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures.
Out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that knows comes the shape I am seeking for reason.
Afraid is a country with no exit visas ...
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.
I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees.
I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.
There are many lesbians and gay men trapped by their fear into silence and invisibility, and they exist in a dim valley of terror wearing nooses of conformity.
So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.
Say what you have to say now! Don't wait until you're sending blips from the other side.
Every woman I have ever known has made a lasting impression on my soul.
I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me - to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.