Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our own oppression as women.
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
Fear
Keeps
Docile
Cannot
Accept
Facets
Women
Beyond
Distortion
May
Accepting
Obedient
Find
Grow
Loyal
Many
Grows
Oppression
Within
Leads
Distortions
Whatever
Defined
Externally
More quotes by Audre Lorde
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
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
To face the realities of our lives is not a reason for despair-despair is a tool of your enemies. Facing the realities of our lives gives us motivation for action. For you are not powerless... You know why the hard questions must be asked. It is not altruism, it is self-preservation-survival.
Audre Lorde
Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.
Audre Lorde
I train myself for triumph by knowing it is mine no matter what.
Audre Lorde
The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. . . .
Audre Lorde
What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?
Audre Lorde
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
But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.
Audre Lorde
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
Say what you have to say now! Don't wait until you're sending blips from the other side.
Audre Lorde
Guilt is not a response to anger it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action.
Audre Lorde
We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.
Audre Lorde
In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.
Audre Lorde
We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.
Audre Lorde
All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing.
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
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
What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face?
Audre Lorde
The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
Audre Lorde