Quote

I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.

Audre Lorde

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Honesty
Listening
Learned
Knew
Thing
Much
People
Openness

More quotes by Audre Lorde

Image
It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
Audre Lorde
Image
I am very, very happy for Alice Walker.
Audre Lorde
Image
I was going to die, if not sooner, then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.
Audre Lorde
Image
I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.
Audre Lorde
Image
Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
Audre Lorde
Image
I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.
Audre Lorde
Image
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
Audre Lorde
Image
The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our own oppression as women.
Audre Lorde
Image
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.
Audre Lorde
Image
I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.
Audre Lorde
Image
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
Image
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
Audre Lorde
Image
... it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.
Audre Lorde
Image
What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?
Audre Lorde
Image
Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideasl The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves--along with the renewed courage to try them out.
Audre Lorde
Image
Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.
Audre Lorde
Image
And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.
Audre Lorde
Image
The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. . . .
Audre Lorde
Image
I know the anger lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other.
Audre Lorde
Image
The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.
Audre Lorde