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Art is not living. It is the use of living.
Audre Lorde
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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
Inspire
Living
Use
Art
Life
More quotes by Audre Lorde
But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.
Audre Lorde
It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
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
What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?
Audre Lorde
The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation.
Audre Lorde
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
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
We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we've done it.
Audre Lorde
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
Once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy.
Audre Lorde
You'd better name yourself, because, if you don't others will do it for you.
Audre Lorde
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
Poetry is not a luxury.
Audre Lorde
Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.
Audre Lorde
So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.
Audre Lorde
The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
Audre Lorde
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
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
When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.
Audre Lorde
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