“Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.”

—Audre Lorde

“The policeman who shot down a 10-year-old in Queens stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood and a voice said "Die you little motherfucker" and there are tapes to prove that. At his trial this policeman and in his own defense "I didn’t notice the size or nothing else only the color." and there are tapes to prove that, too. Today that 37-year-old white man with 13 years of police forcing has been set free by 11 white men who said they were satisfied justice had been done and one black woman who said "They convinced me" meaning they had dragged her 4’10" black woman’s frame over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval until she let go the first real power she ever had and lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children.”

—Audre Lorde “Power”

“Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end. And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”

—Audre Lorde

“I have to believe that caring for myself is not self indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.”

—Audre Lorde

“We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit.”

—Audre Lorde

“You cannot use someone else's fire. You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it.”

—Audre Lorde

“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do.”

—Audre Lorde

“I am a lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly because I work in a university. If their full belies make me fail to recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children because her insides are rotted from home abortions and sterilization; if I fail to recognize the lesbian who chooses not to have children, the woman who remains closeted because her homophobic community is her only life support, the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or further separation. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you. ”

—Audre Lorde,  “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”  [1980] 1984. 

“You cannot, you cannot use someone else’s fire. You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it.”

— -Audre Lorde

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

—Audre Lorde in Sister Outsider. One of my favorite quotes. Happy birthday, Audre.

“I wheel my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket...and a little white girl riding past in her mother's cart calls out excitedly, "Oh look, Mommy, a baby maid!" And your mother shushes you, but she does not correct you.”

—Audre Lorde, 1981 (and yes, it’s still relevant).

“I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you.... What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language. I began to ask each time: "What's the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?" ...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. Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it's personal. And the world won't end. And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking. ”

—Audre Lorde 

“There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.”

—Audre Lorde
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