Top 300 Audre Lorde Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “A choice of pains. That’s what living was all about.”

— Audre Lorde

204. “We must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply and so many of our old ideas disparage.”

— Audre Lorde

205. “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

206. “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.”

— Audre Lorde

207. “It’s a struggle but that’s why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.”

— Audre Lorde

208. “Who I am is what fulfills me and fulfills the vision I have of the world.”

— Audre Lorde

209. “We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared.”

— Audre Lorde

210. “But, on the other hand, I get bored with racism too and recognize that there are still many things to be said about a Black person and a White person loving each other in a racist society.”

— Audre Lorde

211. “The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships.”

— Audre Lorde

212. “Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.”

— Audre Lorde

213. “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

214. “Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.”

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

216. “Hopefully, we can learn from the 60s that we cannot afford to do our enemies work by destroying each other.”

— Audre Lorde

217. “Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.”

— Audre Lorde

218. “As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become “other,” the outsider whose experience and tradition is too “alien” to comprehend.”

— Audre Lorde

219. “My fear of anger taught me nothing.”

— Audre Lorde

220. “I am listening in that fine space between desire and always the grave stillness before choice.”

— Audre Lorde

221. “Each of us struggles daily with the pressures of conformity and the loneliness of difference from which those choices seem to offer escape.”

— Audre Lorde

222. “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

223. “Despair and isolation are my greatest internal enemies. I need to remember I am not alone, even when it feels that way. Now more than ever it is time to put my solitary ways behind me, even while protecting my solitude.”

— Audre Lorde

224. “We’re supposed to see “universal” love as heterosexual. What I insist upon in my work is that there is no such thing as universal love in literature.”

— Audre Lorde

225. “Dark-bright fire lit eyes.”

— Audre Lorde

226. “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

227. “I respect the time I spend each day treating my body, and I consider it part of my political work. It is possible to have some conscious input into our physical processes–not expecting the impossible, but allowing for the unexpected–a kind of training in self-love and physical resistance.”

— Audre Lorde

228. “I have always wanted to be both man and woman... to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks. I would like to enter a woman the way any man can, and be entered – to leave and to be left – to be hot and hard and soft all at the same time in the cause of our loving.”

— Audre Lorde

229. “Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.”

— Audre Lorde

230. “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

231. “I train myself for triumph by knowing it is mine no matter what.”

— Audre Lorde

232. “We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.”

— Audre Lorde

233. “We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.”

— Audre Lorde

234. “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. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge.”

— Audre Lorde

235. “I thought of the African way of perceiving life, as experience to be lived rather than as problem to be solved.”

— Audre Lorde

236. “When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences.”

— Audre Lorde

237. “What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope.”

— Audre Lorde

238. “In discussions around the hiring and firing of Black faculty at universities, the charge is frequently heard that Black women are more easily hired than are Black men.”

— Audre Lorde

239. “She taught me that women who want without needing are expensive and sometimes wasteful, but women who need without wanting are dangerous – they suck you in and pretend not to notice.”

— Audre Lorde

240. “One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.”

— Audre Lorde

241. “It’s difficult to talk about double messages without having a twin tongue.”

— Audre Lorde

242. “To acknowledge privilege is the first step in making it available for wider use. Each of us is blessed in some particular way, whether we recognize our blessings or not.”

— Audre Lorde

243. “But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, white feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past ten years, how come you haven’t also educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us – white and Black – when it is key to our survival as a movement?”

— Audre Lorde

244. “The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.”

— Audre Lorde

245. “We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present.”

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

247. “In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematised oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the space of the dehumanised inferior.”

— Audre Lorde

248. “Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.”

— Audre Lorde

249. “DeLois lived up the block on 142nd Street and never had her hair done, and all the neighbourhood women sucked their teeth as she walked by. Her crispy hair twinkled in the summer sun as her big proud stomach moved her on down the block while I watched, not caring whether or not she was a poem.”

— Audre Lorde

250. “We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. 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