Top 350 Audre Lorde Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer.”

— Audre Lorde

102. “For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.”

— Audre Lorde

103. “To acknowledge privilege is the first step in making it available for wider use.”

— Audre Lorde

104. “Art is not living. It is the use of living.”

— Audre Lorde

105. “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.”

— Audre Lorde

106. “Learning not to crumple before these uncertainties fuels my resolve to print myself upon the texture of each day fully rather than forever.”

— Audre Lorde

107. “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

109. “Revolution is not a one-time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instance, it is learning to address each other’s difference with respect.”

— Audre Lorde

110. “Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.”

— Audre Lorde

111. “Some words live in my throat breeding like adders. Others know sun seeking like gypsies over my tongue to explode through my lips.”

— Audre Lorde

112. “Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.”

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

114. “I am myself, a black woman warrior poet doing my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours? And, of course I am afraid – you can hear it in my voice – because the transformation of silence into language and actions is an act of self-revelation and that always seems fraught with danger.”

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

118. “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.”

— Audre Lorde

119. “I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness as well as my womaness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable.”

— Audre Lorde

120. “Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action.”

— Audre Lorde

121. “You need to reach down and touch the thing that’s boiling inside of you and make it somehow useful.”

— Audre Lorde

122. “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.”

— Audre Lorde

123. “The dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is also false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. For the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic – the sensual – those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings.”

— Audre Lorde

124. “Survival is the greatest gift of love.”

— Audre Lorde

125. “For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.”

— Audre Lorde

126. “I cannot recall the words of my first poem but I remember a promise I made my pen never to leave it lying in somebody else’s blood.”

— Audre Lorde

127. “In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of their own fear – fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgement, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live.”

— Audre Lorde

128. “I do not want to be tolerated, or misnamed. I want to be recognized.”

— Audre Lorde

129. “You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for.”

— Audre Lorde

130. “For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”

— Audre Lorde

131. “We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit.”

— Audre Lorde

132. “I soon discovered that if you keep your mouth shut, people are apt to believe you know everything, and they begin to feel freer and freer to tell you anything, anxious to show that they know something, too.”

— Audre Lorde

133. “What I leave behind has a life of its own.”

— Audre Lorde

134. “Maybe that is all any bravery is, a stronger fear of not being brave.”

— Audre Lorde

135. “When times are hard, do something. If it works, do it some more. If it does not work, do something else. But keep going.”

— Audre Lorde

136. “There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.”

— Audre Lorde

137. “Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama. For not only do we touch our most profoundly creative source, but we do that which is female and self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society.”

— Audre Lorde

138. “However, experience has taught us that action in the now is also necessary, always. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours? ‘If you want us to change the world someday, we at least have to live long enough to grow up!’ shouts the child.”

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

140. “I cannot shut you out the way I shut the others out, so maybe I can destroy you. Must destroy you?”

— Audre Lorde

141. “You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other.”

— Audre Lorde

142. “In a paradoxical sense, once I accepted my position as different from the larger society as well as from any single-sub-society – black or gay – I felt I didn’t have to try so hard. To be accepted. To look femme. To be straight. To look straight. To be proper. To look “nice”. To be liked. To be loved. To be approved. What I didn’t realize was how much harder I had to try merely to stay alive, or rather, to stay human. How much stronger a person I became in that trying.”

— Audre Lorde

143. “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”

— Audre Lorde

144. “Raising Black children-female and male-in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive.”

— Audre Lorde

145. “I feel, therefore I can be free.”

— Audre Lorde

146. “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained.”

— Audre Lorde

147. “One of the hardest things to accept is learning to live within uncertainty and neither deny it nor hide behind it. Most of all, to listen to the messages of uncertainty without allowing them to immobilize me, nor keep me from the certainties of those truths in which I believe. I turn away from any need to justify the future- to live in what has not yet been. Believing, working for what has not yet been while living fully in the present now.”

— Audre Lorde

148. “You will never be able to defend your city while shouting.”

— Audre Lorde

149. “I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action.”

— Audre Lorde

150. “Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action.”

— Audre Lorde