Fuck Yeah Audre Lorde Quotes

Because she said some pretty awesome stuff. Dropping truth bombs overe here, yo! -For all your Audre Lorde quoting needs.

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“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” —Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

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“When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.” --Audre Lorde

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“Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me — so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins.” —Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

[onlinecounsellingcollege]

I have to believe that caring for myself is not self indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.

Audre Lorde (via onlinecounsellingcollege)

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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.

Audre Lorde – The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action

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Mod talk.

As you may have noticed from how rarely we update, I don't actually have time to keep this blog running. Would any of y'all be interested in taking over? Thanks in advance.

[fuckyeahaudrelordequotes]

Mainstream Communication does not want women, particularly white women, responding to racism. It wants racism to be accepted as an immutable given in the fabric of your existence, living eveningtime or the common cold

Audre Lorde. “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism" Sister Outsider. Crossing Press Berkley. 1984. Originally published as the keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Connecticut, June 1981

[fuckyeahaudrelordequotes]

To the white women present who recognize these attitudes as familiar, but most of all, to all my sisters of Color who live and survive thousands of such encounters - to my sisters of Color who like me still tremble their rage under harness, or who sometimes question the expression of our rage as useless and disruptive (the two most popular accusations) - I want to speak about anger, my anger and what I have learned from my travels through its dominions. Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can be become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change. And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile and feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration of those assumptions underlying our lives.

Audre Lorde. “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism" Sister Outsider. Crossing Press Berkley. 1984. Originally published as the keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Connecticut, June 1981

[fuckyeahaudrelordequotes]

This hatred and our anger our very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change. But our time is getting shorter. We have been raised to view any difference other than sex as a reason for destruction, and for Black women and white women to face each other’s anger without denial or immobility or silence or guilt is in itself a heretical and generative idea. It implies peers meeting upon a common basis to examine difference, and to alter those distortions which history has created around our difference. For it is those distortions which separate us. And we must ask ourselves. Who profits from all this?

Audre Lorde. “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism" Sister Outsider. Crossing Press Berkley. 1984. Originally published as the keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Connecticut, June 1981

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Any discussion among women about racism must include the recognition and use of anger. This discussion must be direct and creative because it is crucial. We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty; we must be quite serious about the choice of topic and the angers entwined within it because, rest assured, our opponents are quite serious about their hatred of us and what they are trying to do here.

Audre Lorde. “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism" Sister Outsider. Crossing Press Berkley. 1984. Originally published as the keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Connecticut, June 1981

[fuckyeahaudrelordequotes]

After fifteen years of a women’s movement which professes to address the life concerns and possible futures of all women, I still hear, on campus after campus, “How can we address the issues of racism? No women of Color attended" Or the other side of that statement, “We have no one in our department equipped to teach their work". In other words, racism is a Black woman’s problem, a problem of women of Color, and only we can discuss it.

Audre Lorde. “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism" Sister Outsider. Crossing Press Berkley. 1984. Originally published as the keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Connecticut, June 1981

[fuckyeahaudrelordequotes]

Women responding to racism means women responding to anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, co-optation. My anger is a response to racist attitudes and to the actions and presumptions that arise out of those attitudes. If your dealings with other women reflect those attitudes, then my anger and your attendant fears are spotlights that can be used for growth in the same way that I have used learning to express anger for my growth. But for corrective surgery, not guilt. Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures.

Audre Lorde. “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism" Sister Outsider. Crossing Press Berkley. 1984. Originally published as the keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Connecticut, June 1981

[fuckyeahaudrelordequotes]

As we move toward creating a society within which we can each flourish, ageism is another distortion of relationship which interferes without vision. By ignoring the past, we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes. The “generation gap" is an important social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect of excess, they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memories of the community, nor ask the all important question, “Why?" This gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread.

Audre Lorde. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference".Sister Outsider  Crossing Berkley Press. 1984 (According to the notes, this paper was first published at the Copeland Colloquium, at Amherst College in April 1980)

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Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.

Audre Lorde. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference".Sister Outsider  Crossing Berkley Press. 1984 (According to the notes, this paper was first published at the Copeland Colloquium, at Amherst College in April 1980)

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As we get in touch with the things that we feel are intolerable, in our lives, they become more and more intolerable. If we just once dealt with how much we hate most of what we do, there would be no holding us back from changing it. This is true with any kind of movement. This is the way in which the philosopher/Queen, the poet-warrior leads.

Audre Lorde (interview with Karla Hammond)

[its-visceral-deactivated2013022]

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.

Audre Lorde 

i love this quotation, but i hate that most people quote it without the entire context, leaving the last, very important part out. she was speaking specifically about Black women, but people truncate the quotation to fit their agendas—not realizing that without the ending, they are reinforcing all of the reasons she wrote this in the first place.

(via itsvisceral)

[fuckyeahaudrelordequotes]

Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat

- Audre Lorde