Audre Lorde

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.

The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.

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.

In other words, I would be giving in to a myth of sameness which I think can destroy us.

Your silence will not protect you.

Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away.

I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't.

Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.

Our visions begin with our desires.

Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer.

Who I am is what fulfills me and fulfills the vision I have of the world.

. . . it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are-until the poem-nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.

The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.

what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority

There is a timbre of voice that comes from not being heard and knowing / you are not being heard / noticed only by others / not heard for the same reason.

… our sons must become men – such men as we hope our daughters, born and unborn, will be pleased to live among. Our sons will not grow into women. Their way is more difficult than that of our daughters, for they must move away from us, without us. Hopefully ours have what they have learned from us, and a howness to forge into their own image.

We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.

The more I use my strength in the service of my vision the less I am afraid.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.

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.