Audre Lorde Quotes

Part of the lesbian consciousness is an absolute recognition of the erotic within our lives and, taking that a step further, dealing with the erotic not only in sexual terms.

I can’t really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too?

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

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.

Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.

But the question is a matter of the survival and the teaching. That’s what our work comes down to. No matter where we key into it, it’s the same work, just different pieces of ourselves doing it.

I would like to do another piece of fiction dealing with a number of issues: Lesbian parenting, the 1960’s, and interracial relationships in the Lesbian and Gay community.

Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

You know how fighting fish do it? They blow bubbles and in each one of those bubbles is an egg and they float the egg up to the surface. They keep this whole heavy nest of eggs floating, and they’re constantly repairing it. It’s as if they live in both elements.

Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing.

There are lesbians, God knows… if you came up through lesbian circles in the forties and fifties in New York… who were not feminist and would not call themselves feminists.

Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone; who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.

Whenever a conscious Black woman raises her voice on issues central to her existence, somebody is going to call her strident, because they don’t want to hear about it, nor us. I refuse to be silenced and I refuse to be trivialized, even if I do not say what I have to say perfectly.

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

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.