Quote

The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.

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
Ready
Differences
Children
Rhetoric
Kill
Poet
Poetry
Difference
Instead

More quotes by Audre Lorde

Image
I soon discovered that if you keep your mouth shut, people are apt to believe you know everything, and they begin to feel freer and freer to tell you anything, anxious to show that they know something, too.
Audre Lorde
Image
Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge. They are chaotic, sometimes painful, sometimes contradictory, but they come from deep within us. And we must key into those feelings... This is how new visions begin.
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
Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.
Audre Lorde
Image
Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized.
Audre Lorde
Image
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
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
I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.
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
It is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others-for their use and to our detriment.
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
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
Image
Divide and conquer must become define and empower.
Audre Lorde
Image
Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
Audre Lorde
Image
To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society
Audre Lorde
Image
Out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that knows comes the shape I am seeking for reason.
Audre Lorde
Image
I believe one of the hardest things you can do is conquer your fears, but if you have a goal, then it's your job to open up and let it be real no matter how scary it seems.
Audre Lorde
Image
It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
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