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“There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
― Audre Lorde

“The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.”
― Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

“Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs.”
― Audre Lorde

“Each of us must find our work and do it. Militancy no longer means guns at high noon, if it ever did. It means actively working for change, sometimes in the absence of any surety that change is coming. It means doing the unromantic and tedious work necessary to forge meaningful coalitions, and it means recognizing which coalitions are possible and which coalitions are not. It means knowing that coalition, like unity, means the coming together of whole, self-actualized human beings, focused and believing, not fragmented automatons marching to a prescribed step. It means fighting despair.”
― Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

“We have the power those who came before us have given us, to move beyond the place where they were standing. We have the trees, and water, and sun, and our children. Malcolm X does not live in the dry texts of his words as we read them; he lives in the energy we generate and use to move along the visions we share with him. We are making the future as well as bonding to survive the enormous pressures of the present, and that is what it means to be a part of history.”
― Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity for our existence. It forms the quality of light from which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”
― Audre Lorde

“There are no new pains.”
― Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

“It has rained for five days
running
the world is
a round puddle
of sunless water
where small islands
are only beginning
to cope
a young boy
in my garden
is bailing out water
from his flower patch
when I ask him why
he tells me
young seeds that have not seen sun
forget
and drown easily.”
― Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn: Poems

“For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth. It is not the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices.”
― Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House

“The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need—the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment.”
― Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

“To whom do I owe the power behind my voice, what strength I have become, yeasting up like sudden blood from under the bruised skin's blister?
My father leaves his psychic print upon me, silent, intense, and unforgiving. But his is a distant lightning. Images of women flaming like torches adorn and define the borders of my journey, stand like dykes between me and the chaos. It is the images of women, kind and cruel, that lead me home.”
― Audre Lorde

“For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance.”
― Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

“Mary, do you ever really read the work of Black women? Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us? This is not a rhetorical question.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible.”
― Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

“What writer Audre Lorde says to black men and women is true for all of us: "If we do not define ourselves, we will be defined by others for their use and to our detriment." Our country and perhaps all human history is a pattern of oppression, repression, suppression, subjugation. Racism is part of our heritage, reminding us that not all aspects of a culture should be preserved.”
― Pat Mora, Nepantla: Essays from the Land in the Middle

“Writers give readers courage â€� the courage to be utterly your complete and complex self.

(In reference to Audre Lorde)”
― Jackie Kay

“The good Lorde told us
we weren't meant to survive,

but we've always been good
at going about our lives
in factories and on our knees”
― Chet'la Sebree, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“But I believe that socially sanctioned prosthesis is merely another way of keeping women with breast cancer silent and separate from each other. For instance, what would happen if an army of one-breasted women descended upon Congress and demanded that the use of carcinogenic, fat-stored hormones in beef-feed be outlawed?”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

“Il tuo silenzio non ti proteggerà.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Nzinga is so wise and knowledgeable about how to be a liberated black woman in an oppressive white world that's she's opening my eyes to well, everything, it's like she's Alice and Audre and Angela and Aretha rolled into one, seriously . . .”
― Bernadine Evaristo