Top 350 Audre Lorde Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We are powerful because we have survived.”

— Audre Lorde

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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.”

— Audre Lorde

55. “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.”

— Audre Lorde

56. “What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman’s face?”

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

59. “To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society.”

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

61. “We have too often been expected to speak all things to all people and speak everyone else’s position but our own.”

— Audre Lorde

62. “If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they probably will not survive.”

— Audre Lorde

63. “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.”

— Audre Lorde

64. “There is no Hierarchy of Oppressions.”

— Audre Lorde

65. “Our visions begin with our desires.”

— Audre Lorde

66. “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.”

— Audre Lorde

67. “You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order for us to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.”

— Audre Lorde

68. “And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”

— Audre Lorde

69. “For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection, which is so feared by a patriarchal world...”

— Audre Lorde

70. “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.”

— Audre Lorde

71. “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

72. “I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.”

— Audre Lorde

73. “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”

— Audre Lorde

74. “Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.”

— Audre Lorde

75. “Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.”

— Audre Lorde

76. “You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for. This is the way genuine learning takes place. That’s a very difficult way to live, but it also has served me. It’s been an asset as well as a liability.”

— Audre Lorde

77. “We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.”

— Audre Lorde

78. “For 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 enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

— Audre Lorde

79. “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

80. “The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.”

— Audre Lorde

81. “Silence has never brought us anything of worth.”

— Audre Lorde

82. “I have died too many deaths that were not mine.”

— Audre Lorde

83. “Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.”

— Audre Lorde

84. “All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing...”

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

88. “We recognize that all knowledge is mediated through the body and that feeling is a profound source of information about our lives.”

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

90. “Hatred is a death wish for the hated, not a life wish for anything else.”

— Audre Lorde

91. “I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.”

— Audre Lorde

92. “In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.”

— Audre Lorde

93. “Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.”

— Audre Lorde

94. “When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn’t matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.”

— Audre Lorde

95. “We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.”

— Audre Lorde

96. “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?”

— Audre Lorde

97. “The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation.”

— Audre Lorde

98. “The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.”

— Audre Lorde

99. “Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”

— Audre Lorde

100. “It is not the destiny of Black America to repeat white America’s mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life.”

— Audre Lorde