Audre Lorde was an African American poet, essayist, feminist and civil rights activist. Novelist Audre Lorde was born on February 18, 1934. Technical mastery and emotional expression were trademarks of her work. Her writings exceedingly deal with issues related to civil rights and disability, and the exploration of black female identity. QuotesGeeks listed 70 Audre Lorde feminist quotes to understand Audre Lorde’s philosophy.
Top 10 Audre Lorde Books About Feminist:
- Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
- Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
- The Cancer Journals
- A Burst of Light
- The Black Unicorn
- Your Silence Will Not Protect You : Essays and Poems
- Uses of the Erotic: the erotic as power
- Our Dead Behind Us
- Poetry Is Not a Luxury
- Race, Gender and the Activism of Black Feminist Theory: Working with Audre Lorde
70 Audre Lorde Feminist Quotes:
01.
“I had discovered a new world called voluntary aloneness.”
― Audre Lorde
02.
“This continued blindness between us can only serve the oppressive system within which we live.”
― Audre Lorde
03.
“Women of color in America have grown up within a symphony of anger, at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive, it is in spite of a world that takes for granted our lack of humanness, and which hates our very existence outside of its service. And I say symphony rather than cacophony because we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us apart. We have had to learn to move through them and use them for strength and force and insight within our daily lives. Those of us who did not learn this difficult lesson did not survive. And part of my anger is always libation for my fallen sisters.“
― Audre Lorde
04.
“The literatures of all women of Color recreate the textures of our lives, and many white women are heavily invested in ignoring the real differences. For as long as any difference between us means one of us must be inferior, then the recognition of any difference must be fraught with guilt. To allow women of Color to step out of stereotypes is too guilt-provoking, for it threatens the complacency of those women who view oppression only in terms of sex.”
― Audre Lorde
05.
“Afraid is a country where they issue us passports at birth and hope we never seek citizenship in any other country.”
― Audre Lorde
06.
“Mainstream communication does not want women, particularly white women, responding to racism. It wants racism to be accepted as an immutable given in the fabric of existence, like evening time or the common cold.”
― Audre Lorde
07.
“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
― Audre Lorde
08.
“The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. … For within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were meant to kneel to thought as we were meant to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets.“
― Audre Lorde
09.
“The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences. Nor do the reservoirs of our ancient power know these boundaries. To deal with one without even alluding to the other is to distort our commonality a well as our difference. For then beyond sisterhood is still racism.”
― Audre Lorde
10.
“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.“
— Audre Lorde
11.
“Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves–along with the renewed courage to try them out.“
— Audre Lorde
12.
“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of use who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define adn seek a world in which we can all flourish.”
― Audre Lorde
13.
“When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce 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.”
― Audre Lorde
14.
“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”
― Audre Lorde
15.
“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 upon the reasons they are dying.”
― Audre Lorde
16.
“People in markets find a way of getting down to the essentials of I have, you want; you have, I want.”
― Audre Lorde
17.
“As long as male domination exists, rape will exist. Only women revolting and men made conscious of their responsibility to fight sexism can collectively stop rape.”
― Audre Lorde
18.
“The need for unity is often misnamed as a need for homogeneity.”
― Audre Lorde
19.
“But Black women and our children know the fabric of our lives is stitched with violence and with hatred, that there is no rest.”
― Audre Lorde
20.
“We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society.“
― Audre Lorde
21.
“As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”
― Audre Lorde
22.
“And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.”
― Audre Lorde
23.
“My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.”
― Audre Lorde
24.
“I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my Blackness as well as my womaness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable.”
― Audre Lorde
25.
“We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt.”
― Audre Lorde
26.
“Every woman I have ever known has made a lasting impression on my soul.”
― Audre Lorde
27.
“If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core — the fountain — of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds.”
― Audre Lorde
28.
“But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.”
― Audre Lorde
29.
“The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival.”
― Audre Lorde
30.
“I come like a woman who I am spreading out through nights laughter and promise and dark heat warming whatever I touch that is living consuming only what is already dead.”
― Audre Lorde
31.
“Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me—so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins.”
― Audre Lorde
32.
“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.”
― Audre Lorde
33.
“When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.”
― Audre Lorde
34.
“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.”
― Audre Lorde
35.
“For Black women as well as Black men, it is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others — for their use and to our detriment.”
― Audre Lorde
36.
“It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us but our refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment.”
― Audre Lorde
37.
“Black feminists speak as women because we are women and do not need others to speak for us. It is for Black men to speak up and tell us why and how their manhood is so threatened that Black women should be the prime targets of their justifiable rage. what correct analysis of this capitalist dragon within which we live can legitimize the rape of Black women by Black men?”
― Audre Lorde
38.
“Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction.”
― Audre Lorde
39.
“I write for those women who do not speak, who do not have a voice because they were so terrified because we were taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t.”
― Audre Lorde
40.
“Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly “inferior” capacity to feel deeply.”
― Audre Lorde
41.
“As women, we must root out internalized patterns of oppression within ourselves if we are to move beyond the most superficial aspects of social change.”
― Audre Lorde
42.
“Men avoid women’s observations by accusing us of being too “visceral”.”
― Audre Lorde
43.
“Perhaps I can say this all more simply; I say the love of women healed me.”
― Audre Lorde
44.
“And if Black men choose to assume that privilege for whatever reason- raping, brutalizing and killing Black women- then ignoring these acts of Black male oppression within our communities can only serve our destroyers. One oppression does not justify another.”
― Audre Lorde
45.
“Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism.”
― Audre Lorde
46.
“Women are powerful and dangerous.”
― Audre Lorde
47.
“Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women.”
― Audre Lorde
48.
“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
49.
“If this society ascribes roles to Black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it Black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing?”
― Audre Lorde
50.
“But the strength of women lies in recognizing differences between us as creative, and in standing up to those distortions which we inherited without blame, but which are now ours to alter. The angers of women can transform difference through insight into power. For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth.”
― Audre Lorde
51.
“She taught me that women who want without needing are expensive and sometimes wasteful, but women who need without wanting are dangerous – they suck you in and pretend not to notice.”
― Audre Lorde
52.
“It is the images of women, kind and cruel, that lead me home.”
― Audre Lorde
53.
“Black women who define ourselves and our goals beyond the sphere of a sexual relationship can bring to any endeavor the realized focus of completed and therefore empowered individuals.”
― Audre Lorde
54.
“Any world which did not have a place for me loving women was not a world in which I wanted to live, nor one which I could fight for.”
― Audre Lorde
55.
“In the interests of separation, Black women have been taught to view each other as always suspect, heartless competitors for the scarce male, the all-important prize that could legitimize our existence. This dehumanizing denial of self is no less lethal than the dehumanization of racism to which it is so closely allied.”
― Audre Lorde
56.
“The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.”
― Audre Lorde
57.
“… our sons must become men – such men as we hope our daughters, born and unborn, will be pleased to live among. Our sons will not grow into women. Their way is more difficult than that of our daughters, for they must move away from us, without us. Hopefully ours have what they have learned from us, and a howness to forge into their own image.”
― Audre Lorde
58.
“If I do not bring all of who I am to whatever I do, then I bring nothing, or nothing of lasting worth, for I have withheld my essence.”
― Audre Lorde
59.
“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
― Audre Lorde
60.
“To go to bed and to wake up again day afte day besides a woman, to lie in bed with our arms around each other and drift in and out of sleep, to be with each other not as a quick stolen pleasure, nor as a wild treat but like sunlight, day after day in the regualr course of our lives. I was discovering all the ways that love creeps into life when two selves exist closely, when two women meet.”
― Audre Lorde
61.
“Learning not to crumple before these uncertainties fuels my resolve to print myself upon the texture of each day fully rather than forever.”
― Audre Lorde
62.
“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?”
― Audre Lorde
63.
“I am my best work – a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.”
― Audre Lorde
64.
“Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex.”
― Audre Lorde
65.
“A choice of pains. That’s what living was all about.”
― Audre Lorde
66.
“As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become “other,” the outsider whose experience and tradition is too “alien” to comprehend.”
― Audre Lorde
67.
“Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care.”
― Audre Lorde
68.
“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.”
― Audre Lorde
69.
“I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”
― Audre Lorde
70.
“We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.”
― Audre Lorde
FAQs Related to Audre Lorde Feminist Quotes:
#1. Is Lorde a feminist?
Ans: Yes, Audre Lorde was a feminist and womanist.
#2. What is Audre Lorde famous for?
Ans: Audre Lorde famous for her passionate writings on lesbian feminism and racial issues.
#3. What are the 3 types of feminism?
Ans: The 3 types of feminism are:
• Mainstream/liberal
• Radical
• Cultural
#4. What awards did Audre Lorde win?
Ans:
• Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry 1992, 1993
• American Book Award 1989
#5. When did Audre Lorde die?
Ans: November 17, 1992.
What do you think after reading Audre Lorde Feminist Quotes?
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