Quote

pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without 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
Sensations
Denial
Direct
Emphasizes
Feeling
Suppression
Feelings
Erotic
True
Sensation
Power
Pornography
Without
Represents

More quotes by Audre Lorde

Image
You are the one that you are looking for.
Audre Lorde
Image
Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.
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
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
You will never be able to defend your city while shouting.
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
We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.
Audre Lorde
Image
If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.
Audre Lorde
Image
Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized.
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
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
Audre Lorde
Image
When I speak of the erotic, then I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.
Audre Lorde
Image
As we come to know, accept, and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas-the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.
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
Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded.
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
When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.
Audre Lorde
Image
The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
Audre Lorde
Image
When you are a member of an out-group, and you challenge others with whom you share this outsider position to examine some aspect of their lives that distorts differences between you, then there can be a great deal of pain.
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