Top 300 Audre Lorde Quotes (2023 Update)
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151. “I am Black because I come from the earth’s inside now take my word for jewel in the open light.”

— Audre Lorde

152. “Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.”

— Audre Lorde

153. “Part of the lesbian consciousness is an absolute recognition of the erotic within our lives and, taking that a step further, dealing with the erotic not only in sexual terms.”

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

155. “All of our children are prey. How do we raise them not to prey upon themselves and each other? And this is why we cannot be silent, because our silences will come to testify against us out of the mouths of our children.”

— Audre Lorde

156. “Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.”

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

158. “The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our own oppression as women.”

— Audre Lorde

159. “Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.”

— Audre Lorde

160. “I am a post-mastectomy woman who believes our feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and of use.”

— Audre Lorde

161. “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.”

— Audre Lorde

162. “I want to write rage but all that comes is sadness. We have been sad long enough to make this earth either weep or grow fertile. I am an anachronism, a sport, like the bee that was never meant to fly. Science said so. I am not supposed to exist. I carry death around in my body like a condemnation. But I do live. The bee flies. There must be some way to integrate death into living, neither ignoring it nor giving in to it.”

— Audre Lorde

163. “For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson – that we were never meant to survive.”

— Audre Lorde

164. “What do we want from each other after we have told our stories.”

— Audre Lorde

165. “For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive.”

— Audre Lorde

166. “If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.”

— Audre Lorde

167. “We share a common interest, survival, and it cannot be pursued in isolation from others simply because their differences make us uncomfortable.”

— Audre Lorde

168. “Every woman I have ever known has made a lasting impression on my soul.”

— Audre Lorde

169. “As a Black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend everybody’s comfortable prejudices of who I should be.”

— Audre Lorde

170. “I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.”

— Audre Lorde

171. “And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.”

— Audre Lorde

172. “Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly “inferior” capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.”

— Audre Lorde

173. “Afraid is a country with no exit visas...”

— Audre Lorde

174. “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

175. “In other words, I would be giving in to a myth of sameness which I think can destroy us.”

— Audre Lorde

176. “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

177. “The black unicorn was mistaken for a shadow or symbol and taken through a cold country where mist painted mockeries of my fury.”

— Audre Lorde

178. “I can’t really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too?”

— Audre Lorde

179. “Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.”

— Audre Lorde

180. “When I hear the deepest truths I speak coming out of my mouth sounding like my mother’s, even remembering how I fought against her, I have to reassess both our relationship as well as the sources of my knowing.”

— Audre Lorde

181. “Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity.”

— Audre Lorde

182. “But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.”

— Audre Lorde

183. “If you do not learn to hate you will never be lonely enough to love easily nor will you always be brave, although it does not grow any easier. Do not pretend to convenient beliefs, even when they are righteous; you will never be able to defend your city while shouting.”

— Audre Lorde

184. “Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care.”

— Audre Lorde

185. “Our persistence in examining the tensions within diversity encourages growth toward our common goal. So often we either ignore the past or romanticize it, render the reason for unity useless or mythic. We forget that the necessary ingredient needed to make the past work for the future is our energy in the present, metabolizing one into the other. Continuity does not happen automatically, nor is it a passive process. The.”

— Audre Lorde

186. “These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.”

— Audre Lorde

187. “I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.”

— Audre Lorde

188. “You always learn from observing. You have to pick things up nonverbally because people will never tell you what you’re supposed to know. You have to get it for yourself: whatever it is that you need in order to survive. You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for. This is the way genuine learning takes place.”

— Audre Lorde

189. “Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.”

— Audre Lorde

190. “When you are a member of an out-group, and you challenge others with whom you share this outsider position to examine some aspect of their lives that distorts differences between you, then there can be a great deal of pain.”

— Audre Lorde

191. “I cried to think of how lucky we both were to have found each other, since it was clear that we were the only ones in the world who could understand what we understood in the instantaneous manner in which we understood it.”

— Audre Lorde

192. “I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic.”

— Audre Lorde

193. “Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”

— Audre Lorde

194. “Out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that knows comes the shape I am seeking for reason.”

— Audre Lorde

195. “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.”

— Audre Lorde

196. “Women on trains have a life that is exactly livable the precision of days flashing past.”

— Audre Lorde

197. “It is as hard for our children to believe that we are not omnipotent as it is for us to know it, as parents. But that knowledge is necessary as the first step in the reassessment of power as something other than might, age, privilege, or the lack of fear. It is an important step for a boy, whose societal destruction begins when he is forced to believe that he can only be strong if he doesn’t feel, or if he wins.”

— Audre Lorde

198. “The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us – the poet – whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom.”

— Audre Lorde

199. “I know the anger lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other.”

— Audre Lorde

200. “Women see ourselves diminished or softened by the falsely benign accusations of childishness, of nonuniversality, of changeability, of sensuality.”

— Audre Lorde