Quote

Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.

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
Diminish
Accept
Accepting
Used
Nothing

More quotes by Audre Lorde

Image
Divide and conquer must become define and empower.
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
Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.
Audre Lorde
Image
It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we'll make it.
Audre Lorde
Image
In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.
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
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
Image
It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
Audre Lorde
Image
I stand here as a black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism and homophobia are inseparable. . . .
Audre Lorde
Image
One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.
Audre Lorde
Image
There are no honest poems about dead women.
Audre Lorde
Image
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
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
For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.
Audre Lorde
Image
Hatred is a death wish for the hated, not a life wish for anything else.
Audre Lorde
Image
I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.
Audre Lorde
Image
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
Image
I am very, very happy for Alice Walker.
Audre Lorde
Image
The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
Audre Lorde
Image
We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.
Audre Lorde