Quotes from Audre Lorde

in touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept the powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.

For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

To acknowledge privilege is the first step in making it available for wider use.

You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for.

The black unicorn was mistaken for a shadow or symbol and taken through a cold country where mist painted mockeries of my fury.

When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences.

I realize that if 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.

it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.

Each of us struggles daily with the pressures of conformity and the loneliness of difference from which those choices seem to offer escape.

This jugular vein psychology is based on the fallacy that your assertion or affirmation of self is an attack upon my self—or that my defining myself will somehow prevent or retard your self-definition. The supposition that one sex needs the other's acquiescence in order to exist prevents both from moving together as self-defined persons towards a common goal.

I am reminded of how difficult and time-consuming it is to reinvent the pencil every time you want to send a message.

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.