Audre Lorde Quotes: 11

• Your silence will not protect you.

  Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

• I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.

• Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.

• I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes--everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!

• There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

• I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk throught the rain.

• My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

  The Cancer Journals

• The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.

• Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.

• ...oppression is as American as apple pie...

• For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.