I know the anger lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other.
Interpretation
The quote explores the complexities of anger and love, emphasizing the difficulty of vulnerability.
Audre Lorde's quote delves into the internal struggle between anger and yearning. It highlights how anger can often serve as a defensive shield against the vulnerabilities of longing and desire. The speaker acknowledges that it is easier to express fury than to confront the deeper emotional truth of wanting connection and intimacy. The reference to a 'threatening universe of whiteness' points to societal pressures that complicate these feelings, suggesting that admitting love and the desire for connection can be fraught with challenges.
In practice
In a discussion about emotional challenges in relationships, this quote can highlight the difficulty of expressing true feelings.
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
All relationships change the brain - but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self.
So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.
The moment love becomes a relationship, it becomes a bondage, because there are expectations and there are demands and there are frustrations, and an effort from both sides to dominate. It becomes a struggle for power.
Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
Self-interest is the enemy of all true affection.
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
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