Quotes from Audre Lorde

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.

Revolution is not a one time event.

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.

I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.

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.

Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.

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.

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.

Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.

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.

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.