Audre Lorde

Sourced

• When I speak of the erotic, then I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.
  • entry for June 26 Living Life Fully in Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much, Anne Wilson Schaef, c. 1990

• 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.
  • The Cancer Journals, Special Edition, Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, CA, 1997, p. 13.

• Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever / Only, nothing is eternal.
  • Undersong

• 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. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.
  • essay "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action", in Sister Outsider

• Your silence will not protect you.
  • essay "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action", in Sister Outsider

• I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or chisel or remind you of your me-ness as I discover you in myself.
  • essay "Eye to Eye", in Sister Outsider

• We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.
  • essay "Eye to Eye", in Sister Outsider

• The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
  • essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House", in Sister Outsider

• I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me -- to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.
  • Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

Attributed

• It is not our differences that divide us. it is our inability to recognize, accept & celebrate those differences.

• We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.

• We are powerful because we have survived.

• The erotic cannot be felt secondhand.

• The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.

• If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

• We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded.

• Our visions begin with our desires.

• For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.