Audre Lorde - Quodid

About

Picture of Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde ( AW-dree LORD; born Audrey Geraldine Lorde; February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) was an American writer, professor, philosopher, intersectional feminist, poet, and civil rights activist. She was a self-described "Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet" who dedicated her life and talents to confronting all forms of injustice and oppression. She believed that there could be "no hierarchy of oppressions" among "those who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children".

Quotes from Audre Lorde

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.

life living sexuality sex

We have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing.

spirituality feelings seperation eroticism asceticism

When the strongest words for what I have to offer come out of me sounding like words I remember from my mother's mouth, then I either have to reassess the meaning of everything I have to say now, or re-examine the worth of her old words.

Art is not living. It is the use of living.

I realize that if I 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.

Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.

Revolution is not a onetime event.

When I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in all those assumptions underlining our lives.

Unlike women in other countries, our breaking silence is unlikely to have us jailed, "disappeared," or run off the road at night. Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive, and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.

freedom silence change anger disruption

Without community, there is no liberation… but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.