Top 350 Audre Lorde Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

203. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

205. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

207. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

229. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

237. “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

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. “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

241. “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

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

— 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. “We cannot love ‘our people’ unless we love each of us ourselves, unless I love each piece of myself, those I wish to keep and those I wish to change – for survival is the ability to encompass difference, to encompass change without destruction.”

— Audre Lorde

245. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

247. “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

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

— Audre Lorde

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

— Audre Lorde

250. “What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself – a Black woman warrior poet doing my work – come to ask you, are you doing yours?”

— Audre Lorde