Audre Lorde Quotes - Page 5

If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. (From "Poetry is Not a Luxury")

Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.

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

I believe one of the hardest things you can do is conquer your fears, but if you have a goal, then it's your job to open up and let it be real no matter how scary it seems.

The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those boundaries.

Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. . . .

I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast.

We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.

If you don’t define yourself for yourself then you will be crushed into other's fantasies of you and eaten alive

It is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others-for their use and to our detriment.

To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.

Poetry is not a luxury.

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

Art is not living. It is the use of living. The artist has the ability to take the living and use it in a certain way and produce art.

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge. They are chaotic, sometimes painful, sometimes contradictory, but they come from deep within us. And we must key into those feelings... This is how new visions begin.

Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures.

Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us, wherever and however we are standing, in whatever arena we choose.

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change.

You'd better name yourself, because, if you don't others will do it for you.

How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live unblinded? How much of this pain can I use?

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.

The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.

the fear of death is that you are dying too soon. Nobody wants to, but at the point that you die you can pray that you are no longer the same person. I pray that when I am about to die I will not be the same person that I am now.