Quotes By Audre Lorde

Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.

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.

You know how fighting fish do it? They blow bubbles and in each one of those bubbles is an egg and they float the egg up to the surface. They keep this whole heavy nest of eggs floating, and they're constantly repairing it. It's as if they live in both elements.

In other words, I would be giving in to a myth of sameness which I think can destroy us.

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

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.

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.

I would like to do another piece of fiction dealing with a number of issues: Lesbian parenting, the 1960's, and interracial relationships in the Lesbian and Gay community.

There are lesbians, God knows... if you came up through lesbian circles in the forties and fifties in New York... who were not feminist and would not call themselves feminists.

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.

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

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

Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.