Quote

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

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
Others
Axiomatic
Detriment
Define
Defined
Use

More quotes by Audre Lorde

Image
I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.
Audre Lorde
Image
We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we've done it.
Audre Lorde
Image
Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded.
Audre Lorde
Image
Divide and conquer must become define and empower.
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
We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.
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
One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.
Audre Lorde
Image
We have too often been expected to speak all things to all people and speak everyone else's position but our own.
Audre Lorde
Image
If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.
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
I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.
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
There are lesbians, God knows... if you came up through lesbian circles in the forties and fifties in New York... who were not feminist and would not call themselves feminists.
Audre Lorde
Image
And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
Audre Lorde
Image
But, on the other hand, I get bored with racism too and recognize that there are still many things to be said about a Black person and a White person loving each other in a racist society.
Audre Lorde
Image
Art is not living. It is the use of living. The artist has the ability to take the living and use it in a certain way and produce art.
Audre Lorde
Image
You are the one that you are looking for.
Audre Lorde
Image
There are no honest poems about dead women.
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