Top 350 Audre Lorde Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

209. “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

210. “Dark-bright fire lit eyes.”

— Audre Lorde

211. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

213. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

215. “Yet anger, like guilt, is an incomplete form of human knowledge. More useful than hatred, but still limited. Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but in the long run, strength that is bred by anger alone is a blind force which cannot create the future. It can only demolish the past. Such strength does not focus upon what lies ahead, but upon what lies behind, upon what created it – hatred. And hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else.”

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

217. “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

218. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

221. “As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”

— Audre Lorde

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

229. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

231. “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

232. “The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance.”

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

235. “But the question is a matter of the survival and the teaching. That’s what our work comes down to. No matter where we key into it, it’s the same work, just different pieces of ourselves doing it.”

— Audre Lorde

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

242. “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

243. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

245. “All our children are outriders for a queendom not yet assured.”

— Audre Lorde

246. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

248. “I do not wish my anger and pain and fear about cancer to fossilize into yet another silence, nor to rob me of whatever strength can lie at the core of this experience, openly acknowledged and examined... imposed silence about any area of our lives is a tool for separation and powerlessness.”

— Audre Lorde

249. “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

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

— Audre Lorde