Quote

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

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
Beautiful
Growing
Hidden
Chestnut
Power
Feeling
Incredible
Unexamined
Women
Within
Weakness
Chestnuts
Dark
Places
Reserve
Feelings
Tough
Rises
Spirit
Creativity
Reserves
True
Deep
Nightmare
Place
Emotion
Holds
Unrecorded

More quotes by Audre Lorde

Image
When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.
Audre Lorde
Image
Poetry is not a luxury.
Audre Lorde
Image
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
Audre Lorde
Image
I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness as well as my womaness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable.
Audre Lorde
Image
The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.
Audre Lorde
Image
My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restriction of externally imposed definition.
Audre Lorde
Image
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
Image
The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference. . . .
Audre Lorde
Image
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
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
It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
Audre Lorde
Image
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
Audre Lorde
Image
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. And in order to survive they must let go. This is what mothers teach — love, survival — that is, self-definition and letting go.
Audre Lorde
Image
Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.
Audre Lorde
Image
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
Audre Lorde
Image
When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
Audre Lorde
Image
Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.
Audre Lorde
Image
Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.
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
Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care.
Audre Lorde