Selected Audre Lorde Quotations
• For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.
• When I dare to be powerful -- to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
• Our visions begin with our desires.
• 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?
• We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt.
• The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
• Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.
• Revolution is not a onetime event.
• I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
• My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I'm going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity.
• 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.
• Without community, there is no liberation.
• I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't.
• Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever / Only, nothing is eternal.
• Once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy.
• If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.
• The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.
• It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
• In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.
• Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded.
• When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.
• Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.
• I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
• 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 complaints from the other side.
• But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.
• Art is not living. It is the use of living.
