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")
Interpretation
Dreaming is essential for empowerment and the future, and dismissing it undermines our essence.
In this quote, Audre Lorde emphasizes the vital role that dreams and aspirations play in energizing and empowering individuals, particularly women. She argues that when society views the act of dreaming as a mere luxury, it undermines the foundational strength and potential that dreams provide, ultimately jeopardizing the future and vitality of communities.
In practice
This quote can inspire a women's empowerment workshop.
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.
Injustice in the end produces independence.
The human heart is a factory of idols...Everyon e of us is, from his mother's womb, expert in inventing idols.
Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.
And a question stirred within me: What if he, this yellow-eyed creature, in his disorderly, filthy mound of leaves, in his uncomputed life, is happier than we are?
Misery, mutilation, destruction, terror, starvation and death characterize the process of war and form a principal part of the product.
I would like to express the thoughts of a man who, having finally penetrated the partitions and ceilings of little countries, little coteries, little sects, rises above all these categories and finds himself a child and citizen of the Earth.
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