Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde
Audre Lordewas an African American writer, feminist, womanist, lesbian, and civil rights activist. As a poet, she is best known for technical mastery and emotional expression, particularly in her poems expressing anger and outrage at civil and social injustices she observed throughout her life. Her poems and prose largely dealt with issues related to civil rights, feminism, and the exploration of black female identity. In relation to white feminists in the United States, Lorde famously said, “the master's tools will...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth18 February 1934
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Women on trains have a life that is exactly livable the precision of days flashing past
All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing ...
The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
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.
It does not pay to cherish symbols when the substance lies so close at hand.
In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.
Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.
I train myself for triumph by knowing it is mine no matter what.
The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our own oppression as women.
Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away.
You'd better name yourself, because, if you don't others will do it for you.
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.
The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself.
As we come to know, accept, and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas-the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.