Audre Lorde Quotes - Page 4

What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face?

Silence has never brought us anything of worth.

Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.

I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.

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

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

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

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

Anger is loaded with information and energy.

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

One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.

What do we want from each other after we have told our stories

My fear of anger taught me nothing.

I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.

Every Black woman in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers.

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.

What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?

I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.

There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.

In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.

I was going to die, if not sooner, then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

Hopefully, we can learn from the 60s that we cannot afford to do our enemies work by destroying each other.

Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.

I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.

June Jordan once said something which is just wonderful. I'm paraphrasing her-that her function as a poet was to make revolution irresistible. Well o.k. that is the function of us all, as creative artists, to make the truth, as we see it irresistible.