Top 350 Audre Lorde Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 8

151. “Tenses are a way of ordering the chaos around time.”

— Audre Lorde

152. “What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman’s face? What woman’s terms of oppression have become precious and necessary to her as a ticket into the fold of the righteous, away from the cold winds of self-scrutiny?”

— Audre Lorde

153. “But the strength of women lies in recognizing differences between us as creative, and in standing up to those distortions which we inherited without blame, but which are now ours to alter. The angers of women can transform difference through insight into power. For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth.”

— Audre Lorde

154. “It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.”

— Audre Lorde

155. “I am very, very happy for Alice Walker.”

— Audre Lorde

156. “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are – until the poem – nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.”

— Audre Lorde

157. “I do not think about my death as being imminent, but I live my days against a background noise of mortality and constant uncertainty. 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

158. “We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.”

— Audre Lorde

159. “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 there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”

— Audre Lorde

160. “I have suckled the wolf’s lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter.”

— Audre Lorde

161. “There are no honest poems about dead women.”

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

164. “It is within our differences that we are both most powerful and most vulnerable, and some of the most difficult tasks of our lives are the claiming of differences and learning to use those differences for bridges rather than as barriers between us.”

— Audre Lorde

165. “Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away.”

— Audre Lorde

166. “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

167. “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

168. “The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself.”

— Audre Lorde

169. “The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.”

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

171. “I am Black because I come from the earth’s inside now take my word for jewel in the open light.”

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

173. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

180. “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

181. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

188. “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

189. “I am not just a lesbian. I am not just a poet. I am not just a mother. Honor the complexity of your vision and yourselves.”

— Audre Lorde

190. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

195. “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

196. “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

197. “Dark-bright fire lit eyes.”

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

— Audre Lorde

200. “You’d better name yourself, because, if you don’t others will do it for you.”

— Audre Lorde