Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.
Audre Lorde
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Audre Lorde
Age: 58 †
Born: 1934
Born: February 18
Died: 1992
Died: November 17
Essayist
Feminist
Librarian
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Audre Geraldine Lorde
Trying
Grind
Machine
Anyway
Dust
Machines
Whether
Speak
More quotes by Audre Lorde
For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, beautiful and tough as chestnut stanchions against our nightmare of weakness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling
Audre Lorde
Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
Audre Lorde
Guilt is not a response to anger it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action.
Audre Lorde
Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.
Audre Lorde
I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.
Audre Lorde
The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.
Audre Lorde
We are powerful because we have survived
Audre Lorde
I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.
Audre Lorde
Out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that knows comes the shape I am seeking for reason.
Audre Lorde
It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.
Audre Lorde
I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me - to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.
Audre Lorde
Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.
Audre Lorde
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.
Audre Lorde
Raising Black children-female and male-in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive.
Audre Lorde
We have too often been expected to speak all things to all people and speak everyone else's position but our own.
Audre Lorde
In discussions around the hiring and firing of Black faculty at universities, the charge is frequently heard that Black women are more easily hired than are Black men.
Audre Lorde
It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
Audre Lorde
I learned to read from Mrs. Augusta Baker, the children's librarian. ... If that was the only good deed that lady ever did in her life, may she rest in peace. Because that deed saved my life, if not sooner, then later, when sometimes the only thing I had to hold on to was knowing I could read.
Audre Lorde
Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.
Audre Lorde
For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection, which is so feared by a patriarchal world.
Audre Lorde