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Our visions begin with our desires.


Audre Lorde

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The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused...
AUDRE LORDE It has rained for five days
running
the world is
a round puddle
of sunless water...
AUDRE LORDE My literary heroes were mostly women writers and thinkers - Joy Williams, Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, ...
ALEXANDER CHEE There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
AUDRE LORDE But in another way, community is a terrible place. It is the place where our limitations and our ego...
JEAN VANIER Say ‘No’ to your desires that are antagonistic to your goals and visions
SUNDAY ADELAJA You know how fighting fish do it? They blow bubbles and in each one of those bubbles is an egg and t...
AUDRE LORDE Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political w...
AUDRE LORDE I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not pr...
AUDRE LORDE When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less an...
AUDRE LORDE Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs o...
AUDRE LORDE Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expe...
AUDRE LORDE Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehuman...
AUDRE LORDE and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we ...
AUDRE LORDE Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs o...
AUDRE LORDE Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of ...
AUDRE LORDE . . . [O]nce we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves...
AUDRE LORDE When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and...
AUDRE LORDE I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
AUDRE LORDE But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women...
AUDRE LORDE I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
AUDRE LORDE Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.
AUDRE LORDE I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things tha...
AUDRE LORDE Revolution is not a onetime event.
AUDRE LORDE Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the found...
AUDRE LORDE I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so ter...
AUDRE LORDE Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.
AUDRE LORDE We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what ...
AUDRE LORDE When I use my strength in the service of my vision it makes no difference whether or not I am afraid...
AUDRE LORDE In discussions around the hiring and firing of Black faculty at universities, the charge is frequent...
AUDRE LORDE Art is not living. It is the use of living.
AUDRE LORDE Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to ...
AUDRE LORDE Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.
AUDRE LORDE The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
AUDRE LORDE I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made ve...
AUDRE LORDE Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each o...
AUDRE LORDE Your silence will not protect you.
AUDRE LORDE The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
AUDRE LORDE In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and gro...
AUDRE LORDE If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for ...
AUDRE LORDE There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
AUDRE LORDE The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between th...
AUDRE LORDE When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less an...
AUDRE LORDE It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate th...
AUDRE LORDE When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are ...
AUDRE LORDE The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reac...
AUDRE LORDE Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.
AUDRE LORDE When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop tho...
AUDRE LORDE The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.
AUDRE LORDE Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge
AUDRE LORDE When I use my strength in the service of may vision it makes no difference whether or not I am afrai...
AUDRE LORDE If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and e...
AUDRE LORDE Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away...
AUDRE LORDE There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, w...
AUDRE LORDE The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we l...
AUDRE LORDE For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily...
AUDRE LORDE We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the ...
AUDRE LORDE My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken,...
AUDRE LORDE Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded...
AUDRE LORDE Who I am is what fulfills me and what fulfills the vision I have of a world.
AUDRE LORDE Silence has never brought us anything of worth
AUDRE LORDE As we come to know, accept, and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses an...
AUDRE LORDE I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not e...
AUDRE LORDE I would like to do another piece of fiction dealing with a number of issues: Lesbian parenting, the ...
AUDRE LORDE It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color wil...
AUDRE LORDE I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently ...
AUDRE LORDE Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it l...
AUDRE LORDE The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house
AUDRE LORDE In the interests of separation, Black women have been taught to view each other as always suspect, h...
AUDRE LORDE It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a se...
AUDRE LORDE I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, t...
AUDRE LORDE What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another ...
AUDRE LORDE As a Black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some part of me guaranteed t...
AUDRE LORDE The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat hi...
AUDRE LORDE If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister's oppression and she calls me on it, to answe...
AUDRE LORDE I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as t...
AUDRE LORDE I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had th...
AUDRE LORDE Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always ...
AUDRE LORDE ... poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the li...
AUDRE LORDE We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are distorted and destroyed,...
AUDRE LORDE We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak ...
AUDRE LORDE A Litany for Survival

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon...
AUDRE LORDE In other words, I would be giving in to a myth of sameness which I think can destroy us.
AUDRE LORDE When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or te...
AUDRE LORDE What better way is there to police the streets of a minority community than to turn one generation a...
AUDRE LORDE I have died too many deaths that were not mine.
AUDRE LORDE I am
the sun and moon and forever hungry
the sharpened edge
where day and night shall...
AUDRE LORDE The black unicorn was mistaken for a shadow or symbol and taken through a cold country where mist pa...
AUDRE LORDE young seeds that have not seen sun forget and drown easily.
AUDRE LORDE I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic
AUDRE LORDE places do not change so much as what we seek in them
AUDRE LORDE I am tired of writing memorials to black men
whom I was on the brink of knowing
weary like...
AUDRE LORDE ...may I never lose that terror that keeps me brave
AUDRE LORDE see me now
your severed daughter
laughing our name into echo
all the world shall reme...
AUDRE LORDE Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.
AUDRE LORDE What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow ...
AUDRE LORDE The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.
ANDRé BAZIN I prefer to be a dreamer among the humblest, with visions to be realized, than lord among those with...
KHALIL GIBRAN I prefer to be a dreamer among the humblest, with visions to be realized, than lord among those with...
KAHLIL GIBRAN Blessedness consists in the accomplishment of our desires, and in our having only regular desires.
SAINT AUGUSTINE

More Audre Lorde

You know how fighting fish do it? They blow bubbles and in each one of those bubbles is an egg and t...
AUDRE LORDE Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political w...
AUDRE LORDE I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not pr...
AUDRE LORDE When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less an...
AUDRE LORDE Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs o...
AUDRE LORDE Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expe...
AUDRE LORDE Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehuman...
AUDRE LORDE and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we ...
AUDRE LORDE Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs o...
AUDRE LORDE Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of ...
AUDRE LORDE . . . [O]nce we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves...
AUDRE LORDE When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and...
AUDRE LORDE I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
AUDRE LORDE But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women...
AUDRE LORDE I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
AUDRE LORDE Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.
AUDRE LORDE I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things tha...
AUDRE LORDE Revolution is not a onetime event.
AUDRE LORDE Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the found...
AUDRE LORDE I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so ter...
AUDRE LORDE Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.
AUDRE LORDE We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what ...
AUDRE LORDE When I use my strength in the service of my vision it makes no difference whether or not I am afraid...
AUDRE LORDE In discussions around the hiring and firing of Black faculty at universities, the charge is frequent...
AUDRE LORDE Art is not living. It is the use of living.
AUDRE LORDE Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to ...
AUDRE LORDE Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.
AUDRE LORDE The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
AUDRE LORDE I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made ve...
AUDRE LORDE Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each o...
AUDRE LORDE Your silence will not protect you.
AUDRE LORDE The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
AUDRE LORDE In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and gro...
AUDRE LORDE If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for ...
AUDRE LORDE There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
AUDRE LORDE The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between th...
AUDRE LORDE When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less an...
AUDRE LORDE It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate th...
AUDRE LORDE When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are ...
AUDRE LORDE The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reac...
AUDRE LORDE Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.
AUDRE LORDE When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop tho...
AUDRE LORDE The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.
AUDRE LORDE Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge
AUDRE LORDE When I use my strength in the service of may vision it makes no difference whether or not I am afrai...
AUDRE LORDE If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and e...
AUDRE LORDE Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away...
AUDRE LORDE There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, w...
AUDRE LORDE The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we l...
AUDRE LORDE For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily...
AUDRE LORDE We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the ...
AUDRE LORDE The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused...
AUDRE LORDE My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken,...
AUDRE LORDE Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded...
AUDRE LORDE Who I am is what fulfills me and what fulfills the vision I have of a world.
AUDRE LORDE Silence has never brought us anything of worth
AUDRE LORDE As we come to know, accept, and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses an...
AUDRE LORDE I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not e...
AUDRE LORDE I would like to do another piece of fiction dealing with a number of issues: Lesbian parenting, the ...
AUDRE LORDE It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color wil...
AUDRE LORDE There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
AUDRE LORDE I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently ...
AUDRE LORDE Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it l...
AUDRE LORDE The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house
AUDRE LORDE In the interests of separation, Black women have been taught to view each other as always suspect, h...
AUDRE LORDE It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a se...
AUDRE LORDE I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, t...
AUDRE LORDE What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another ...
AUDRE LORDE As a Black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some part of me guaranteed t...
AUDRE LORDE The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat hi...
AUDRE LORDE If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister's oppression and she calls me on it, to answe...
AUDRE LORDE I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as t...
AUDRE LORDE I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had th...
AUDRE LORDE Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always ...
AUDRE LORDE ... poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the li...
AUDRE LORDE We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are distorted and destroyed,...
AUDRE LORDE We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak ...
AUDRE LORDE A Litany for Survival

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon...
AUDRE LORDE In other words, I would be giving in to a myth of sameness which I think can destroy us.
AUDRE LORDE When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or te...
AUDRE LORDE What better way is there to police the streets of a minority community than to turn one generation a...
AUDRE LORDE I have died too many deaths that were not mine.
AUDRE LORDE It has rained for five days
running
the world is
a round puddle
of sunless water...
AUDRE LORDE I am
the sun and moon and forever hungry
the sharpened edge
where day and night shall...
AUDRE LORDE The black unicorn was mistaken for a shadow or symbol and taken through a cold country where mist pa...
AUDRE LORDE young seeds that have not seen sun forget and drown easily.
AUDRE LORDE I have been woman for a long time beware my smile I am treacherous with old magic
AUDRE LORDE places do not change so much as what we seek in them
AUDRE LORDE I am tired of writing memorials to black men
whom I was on the brink of knowing
weary like...
AUDRE LORDE ...may I never lose that terror that keeps me brave
AUDRE LORDE see me now
your severed daughter
laughing our name into echo
all the world shall reme...
AUDRE LORDE Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.
AUDRE LORDE What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow ...
AUDRE LORDE I get paralyzingly nervous a lot of times, so I tried bravado. The way I dress and carry myself, a l...
LORDE The phrase 'teen hottie' literally makes me want to throw up.
LORDE My name is Ella; that's who I am at school, hanging out with friends, while I'm doing homewo...
LORDE I'm really interested in kind of weird social situations and cliques, watching girls vying for a...
LORDE I am really into how words sound out loud, so I was always the kid who would, like, read the page of...
LORDE I read a lot of short fiction, like Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Carver and Wells Tower.
LORDE I'm speaking for a bunch of girls when I say that the idea that feminism is completely natural a...
LORDE I'm very conscious of people having pretty short attention spans: I know, I'm guilty of it. ...
LORDE When I was trying to come up with a stage name, I thought 'Lord' was super rad, but really m...
LORDE I've always been fascinated with aristocracy. I'm really interested in the Ivy Leagues, the ...
LORDE Musicians like James Blake were a big influence on me. How he uses his vocals is amazing. And then Y...
LORDE I think young people are the most creative and the coolest - people that we should be learning from....
LORDE I curate my life in a way. It's always playing on my mind, kind of a love-hate relationship. I&#...
LORDE Taylor Swift is so flawless, and so unattainable, and I don't think it's breeding anything g...
LORDE I've been in some situations where people have treated me like a fascinating toy. You know, it&#...
LORDE Grace Jones was an influence, because I was like, 'These shoulders! These pants! Girls can wear ...
LORDE I find a lot of feminist reading quite confusing and that often there's a set of rules, and peop...
LORDE People respond to something which intrigues them instead of something that gives them all the inform...
LORDE I'm a pop princess at heart. Pop is about distilling what you want to say and making it easy. An...
LORDE Obviously I've had this fascination with aristocracy my whole life. Like, the kings and queens o...
LORDE It must have been when I was 14 or 15 that I started tentatively writing songs and was able to conve...
LORDE I'm kind of over getting told to throw my hands up in the air,
So there.
LORDE I actually love Twitter and Instagram. I do think it's so strange to think that 20 years ago, pe...
LORDE In a perfect world, I would never do any interviews, and probably there would be one photo out there...
LORDE With pop music and pop musicians, you know everything about everyone all the time, particularly thei...
LORDE You're the only friend I need
Sharing beds like little kids
And laughing 'til our ribs g...
LORDE I come from a big, loud family, and I'm the quieter one. Performing is something I have to switc...
LORDE I started writing music when I was around twelve. My current record company saw a video of me perfor...
LORDE I try to stay away from talking about boys all the time. You can go to Taylor Swift to hear that.
LORDE I'm a Kiwi. I'm from a beach suburb called Takapuna, which is on the north shore of Auckland...
LORDE My dad is a civil engineer, and my mom is a stay-at-home mom. The fact that my parents weren't r...
LORDE I love thrift shopping. You can get ten things because everything costs, like, three dollars.
LORDE We all have Tumblr, and we all have Instagram and everything. People care so much about it because, ...
LORDE If your dreams don't scare you, they are not big enough.
LORDE