Audre Lorde

Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action.

For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection, which is so feared by a patriarchal world.

If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. (From "Poetry is Not a Luxury")

Say what you have to say now! Don't wait until you're sending blips from the other side.

Self-care is not about self-indulgence , it is about self-preservati on.

Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideasl The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves--along with the renewed courage to try them out.

We have too often been expected to speak _x000D_ all things to all people and speak everyone else's position _x000D_ but our own.

I have always wanted to be both man and woman, to incorporate the strongest and richest parts of my mother and father within/into me - to share valleys and mountains upon my body the way the earth does in hills and peaks.

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.

When I speak of the erotic, then I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we'll make it.

I am a post-mastectomy woman who believes our feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and of use.

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.

The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those boundaries.

[Speaking] is never without fear; of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now, that if I were to have been born mute, and had maintained an oath of silence my whole life for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die.

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.

When I use my strength in the service of my vision it makes no difference whether or not I am afraid.

If you don’t define yourself for yourself then you will be crushed into other's fantasies of you and eaten alive

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.

Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.

to that piece in each of us that refuses to be silent.