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

About Audre Lorde

Portrait 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...

More quotations from Audre Lorde

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.

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.

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

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.

Revolution is not a onetime event.

More quotations tagged with “sex”

Sex is hardly ever just about sex.

—Shirley MacLaine

You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it; it is by nature self-erasing; you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.

—E. L. Doctorow

truth memory sex brain

If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had if only they persevere.

sex celibacy perseverence

But seduction isn't making someone do what they don't want to do. Seduction is enticing someone into doing what they secretly want to do already.

—Zsa Zsa Gabor

I know love and lust don't always keep the same company.

History

3 Aug 2013 Added