Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
You'd better name yourself, because, if you don't others will do it for you.
Audre Lorde
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Name
Names
Others
Better
More quotes by 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
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
It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.
Audre Lorde
The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself.
Audre Lorde
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
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
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
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
If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest.
Audre Lorde
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
If you do not learn to hate you will never be lonely enough to love easily nor will you always be brave, although it does not grow any easier. Do not pretend to convenient beliefs, even when they are righteous you will never be able to defend your city while shouting.
Audre Lorde
The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.
Audre Lorde
From my membership in all of these groups I have learned that oppression and the intolerance of difference come in all shapes and sizes and colors and sexualities and that among those of us who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of oppression.
Audre Lorde
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
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
Audre Lorde
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
Audre Lorde
Poetry is not a luxury.
Audre Lorde
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
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
Audre Lorde
Raising Black children — female and male — in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive. And in order to survive they must let go. This is what mothers teach — love, survival — that is, self-definition and letting go.
Audre Lorde