Top 350 Audre Lorde Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Black men are not so passive that they must have Black women speak for them. Even my fourteen-year-old son knows that. Black men themselves must examine and articulate their own desires and positions and stand by the conclusions thereof. No point is served by a Black male professional who merely whines at the absence of his viewpoint in Black women’s work. Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.”

— Audre Lorde

302. “Simone de Beauvoir’s words echo in my head: “It is in the recognition of the genuine conditions of our lives that we gain the strength to act and our motivation for change.”

— Audre Lorde

303. “When there is no connection at all between people, then anger is a way of bringing them closer together, of making contact. But when there is a great deal of connectedness that is problematic or threatening or unacknowledged, then anger is a way of keeping people separate, of putting distance between us.”

— Audre Lorde

304. “Each of us is called upon to take a stand. So in these days ahead, as we examine ourselves and each other, our works, our fears, our differences, our sisterhood and survivals, I urge you to tackle what is most difficult for us all, self-scrutiny of our complacencies, the idea that since each of us believes she is on the side of right, she need not examine her position.”

— Audre Lorde

305. “The language by which we have been taught to dismiss ourselves and our feelings as suspect is the same language we use to dismiss and suspect each other.”

— Audre Lorde

306. “And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective.”

— Audre Lorde

307. “I had discovered a new world called voluntary aloneness.”

— Audre Lorde

308. “One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness. When I develop that sense of awareness, I develop, by extension, a sense concerning you. That does not dictate why my relationship is with you. I may have to fight you, but as soon as I am aware of you, I must relate to you. I must take you in. This is engagement. It is a prerequisite to any kind of love, and it is difficult and necessary.”

— Audre Lorde

309. “The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need – the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment.”

— Audre Lorde

310. “Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer. None of these struggles are ever easy, and even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded, because it is so easy not to battle at all, to just accept and call that acceptance inevitable.”

— Audre Lorde

311. “It’s possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we’ll make it.”

— Audre Lorde

312. “Self-preservation warned some of us that we could not afford to settle for one easy definition, one nearrow individuation of self. At the Bag, at Hunter College, uptown in Harlem, at the library, there was a piece of the real me bound in each place, and growing.”

— Audre Lorde

313. “The terror of Black Lesbians is buried in that deep inner place where we have been taught to fear all difference – to kill or ignore it. Be assured: loving women is not a communicable disease. You don’t catch it like the common cold.”

— Audre Lorde

314. “I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk throught the rain.”

— Audre Lorde

315. “I have often wondered why the farthest-out position always feels so right to me; why extremes, although difficult and sometimes painful to maintain, are always more comfortable than one plan running straight down a line in the unruffled middle.”

— Audre Lorde

316. “Staples sees in Ntozake Shange’s play For Colored Girls “a collective appetite for black male blood.” Yet it is my female children and my black sisters who lie bleeding all around me, victims of the appetites of our brothers.”

— Audre Lorde

317. “But it is also true that sometimes we cannot heal ourselves close to the very people from whom we draw strength and light, because they are also closest to the places and tastes and smells that go along with a pattern of living we are trying to rearrange.”

— Audre Lorde

318. “Most Black lesbians were closeted, correctly recognizing the Black community’s lack of interest in our position, as well as the many more immediate threats to our survival as Black people in a racist society. It was hard enough to be Black, to be Black and female, to be Black and female, and gay. To be Black, female, gay, and out of the closet in a white environment, even to the extent of dancing in the Bagatelle, was considered by many Black lesbians to be simply suicidal.”

— Audre Lorde

319. “There are no new pains.”

— Audre Lorde

320. “And that anger, as we know from our flayed egos of childhood, is armed with a powerful cruelty learned in the bleakness of the too-early battles for survival. ‘You can’t take it, huh!’ The Dozens. A Black game of supposedly friendly rivalry and name calling; in reality, a crucial exercise in learning how to absorb verbal abuse without faltering.”

— Audre Lorde

321. “Every woman has a well stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.”

— Audre Lorde

322. “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

323. “For women raised to fear, too often anger threatens annihilation. In the male construct of brute force, we were taught that our lives depended upon the good will of patriarchal power. The anger of others was to be avoided at all costs because there was nothing to be learned from it but pain, a judgment that we had been bad girls, come up lacking, not done what we were supposed to do. And if we accept our powerlessness, then of course any anger can destroy us.”

— Audre Lorde

324. “But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies.”

— Audre Lorde

325. “The only answer to death is the heat and confusion of living; the only dependable warmth is the warmth of the blood.”

— Audre Lorde

326. “The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible.”

— Audre Lorde

327. “If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color?”

— Audre Lorde

328. “For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over the globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomises our daughters and our earth.”

— Audre Lorde

329. “We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. 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

330. “The angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate them with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves agains the manner of saying. When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar. I have tried to learn my anger’s usefulness to me, as well as its limitations.”

— Audre Lorde

331. “But I loved her, because she moved like she felt she was somebody special, like she was somebody I’d like to know someday. She moved like how I thought god’s mother must have moved, and my mother, once upon a time, and someday maybe me.”

— Audre Lorde

332. “If you conquer the bread problem, that gives you at least a chance to look around at the others.”

— Audre Lorde

333. “Although of course being incorrect is always the hardest, but even that is becoming less important. The world will not stop if I make a mistake.”

— Audre Lorde

334. “The enormity of our task, to turn the world around. It feels like turning my life around, inside out.”

— Audre Lorde

335. “How the young attempt and are broken differs from age to age We were brown free girls love singing beneath our skin sun in our hair in our eyes sun our fortune and the wind had made us golden made us gay.”

— Audre Lorde

336. “I am listening to what fear teaches. I will never be gone. I am a scar, a report from the frontlines, a talisman, a resurrection, a rough place on the chin of complacency.”

— Audre Lorde

337. “Mary, do you ever really read the work of Black women? Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us? This is not a rhetorical question.”

— Audre Lorde

338. “And if we do not grow with our children, they cannot learn.”

— Audre Lorde

339. “Emily, who loved her best friend so much she still cannot listen to the records they once enjoyed together, and it is five years already since her friend died.”

— Audre Lorde

340. “My work is to inhabit the silences with which I have lived and fill them with myself until they have the sounds of brightest day and the loudest thunder. And then there will be no room left inside of me for what has been except as memory of sweetness enhancing what can and is to be.”

— Audre Lorde

341. “I feel trapped on a lonely star.”

— Audre Lorde

342. “If I can look directly at my life and my death without flinching I know there is nothing they can ever do to me again.”

— Audre Lorde

343. “What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and at, tempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”

— Audre Lorde

344. “Growing up Fat Black Female and almost blind in america requires so much surviving that you have to learn from it or die.”

— Audre Lorde

345. “Because you are Black and lesbian, you seem to speak with the moral authority of suffering.′ Yes, I am Black and lesbian, and what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority. There is a difference.”

— Audre Lorde

346. “Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men.”

— Audre Lorde

347. “I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I’ll be sending messages on a ouija board, cryptic comments from the other side. When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less important whether or not I am unafraid.”

— Audre Lorde

348. “As soon as a challenge was overcome, it creased to be a challenge, becoming the expected and ordinary rather than something I had achieved with difficulty, and could, therefore, be justly proud of. I could not own my own triumphs, nor give myself credit for them.”

— Audre Lorde

349. “But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.”

— Audre Lorde

350. “I wish to live whatever life I have as fully and as sweetly as possible.”

— Audre Lorde