68 Beautiful Audre Lorde Quotes on Finding Forgiveness, Love and Community

Audre Lorde is an inspiration that left the world too soon. She was a poet where she was able to express the social/civil injustices through her poems. You’ll feel her experiences shining through her words, and beyond the racism, there was also a strong sense of feminism, illness, disability and lesbianism. Clearly these were tough times for many African Americans who simply sought to be accepted.

Her career as a poet, writer and civil rights activist was commended highly by both sides. At one time, she was (rather accurately) described as a “black lesbian feminist warrior mother” and her work was trailblazing at the time. Even today, she’s often referenced for her powerful words of wisdom.

If you’re seeking forgiveness, love and community, there are so few people we would place so highly. Despite her struggles, you’ll find some glimmer of hope through these quotes by Audre Lorde, all collected from numerous sources including several of her books.

1. If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.

Audre Lorde

2. We must be the change we wish to see in the world.

Audre Lorde

3. I am my best work – a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.

Audre Lorde

4. In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action.

Audre Lorde

5. 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

6. There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise.

Audre Lorde

7. We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.

Audre Lorde

8. Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.

Audre Lorde

9. For wherever our oppression manifests itself in this country, black people are potential victims.

Audre Lorde

10. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

Audre Lorde

11. If you can’t change reality, change your perceptions of it.

Audre Lorde

12. Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing.

Audre Lorde

13. I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.

Audre Lorde

14. You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for. This is the way genuine learning takes place. That’s a very difficult way to live, but it also has served me. It’s been an asset as well as a liability.

Audre Lorde

15. In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.

Audre Lorde

16. I am trying to become the strongest person I can become to live the life I have been given and to help effect change toward a liveable future for this earth and for my children.

Audre Lorde

17. It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

Audre Lorde

18. Learning not to crumple before these uncertainties fuels my resolve to print myself upon the texture of each day fully rather than forever.

Audre Lorde

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

Audre Lorde

20. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.

Audre Lorde

21. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.

Audre Lorde

22. 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

23. We recognize that all knowledge is mediated through the body and that feeling is a profound source of information about our lives.

Audre Lorde

24. To acknowledge privilege is the first step in making it available for wider use. Each of us is blessed in some particular way, whether we recognize our blessings or not. And each one of us, somewhere in our lives, must clear a space within that blessing where she can call upon whatever resources are available to her in the name of something that must be done.

Audre Lorde

25. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

Audre Lorde

26. I know that my people cannot possibly profit from the oppression of any other group which seeks the right to peaceful existence.

Audre Lorde

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

Audre Lorde

28. We must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply and so many of our old ideas disparage.

Audre Lorde

29. 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

30. Unacknowledged class differences rob women of each others’ energy and creative insight.

Audre Lorde

31. Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.

Audre Lorde

32. Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.

Audre Lorde

33. 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.

Audre Lorde

34. Out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that knows comes the shape I am seeking for reason.

Audre Lorde

35. …and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.

Audre Lorde

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

Audre Lorde

37. We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

Audre Lorde

38. Our visions begin with our desires.

Audre Lorde

39. I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.

Audre Lorde

40. Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity.

Audre Lorde

41. “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

Audre Lorde

42. 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

43. We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit.

Audre Lorde

44. In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only poetry to hint at possibility made real.

Audre Lorde

45. And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.

Audre Lorde

46. Among those of us who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children there can be no hierarchies of oppression.

Audre Lorde

47. You cannot, you cannot use someone else’s fire. You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it.

Audre Lorde

48. As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny, and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.

Audre Lorde

49. And I find I must remember that the pain is not its own reason for being. It is a part of living. And the only kind of pain that is intolerable is pain that is wasteful, pain from which we do not learn. And I think that we must learn to distinguish between the two.

Audre Lorde

50. For Black women as well as Black men, it is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others — for their use and to our detriment.

Audre Lorde

51. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life.

Audre Lorde

52. When times are hard, do something. If it works, do it some more. If it does not work, do something else. But keep going.

Audre Lorde

53. I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk through the rain.

Audre Lorde

54. When a people share a common oppression, certain kinds of skills and joint defenses are developed. And if you survive you survive because those skills and defenses have worked. When you come into conflict over other existing differences, there is a vulnerability to each other which is desperate and very deep.

Audre Lorde

55. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from  all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible.

Audre Lorde

56. 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.

Audre Lorde

57. The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

Audre Lorde

58. When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.

Audre Lorde

59. For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.

Audre Lorde

60. The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.

Audre Lorde

61. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.

Audre Lorde

62. Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves–along with the renewed courage to try them out.

Audre Lorde

63. 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, like evening-time or the common cold.

Audre Lorde

64. You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order for us to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.

Audre Lorde

65. Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they’re dying.

Audre Lorde

66. One of the hardest things to accept is learning to live within uncertainty and neither deny it nor hide behind it. Most of all, to listen to the messages of uncertainty without allowing them to immobilize me, nor keep me from the certainties of those truths in which I believe. I turn away from any need to justify the future- to live in what has not yet been. Believing, working for what has not yet been while living fully in the present now.

Audre Lorde

67. If I speak to you in anger, at least I have spoken to you.

Audre Lorde

68. I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only. I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group.

Audre Lorde