Audre Lorde

"The quality of our relationships is the quality of our lives."

"To be complete, we must acknowledge and honor all the different parts of ourselves."

"Revolution is not a one-time event, but a continuous process of growth and change."

"We are made of our choices, our commitments, and our love."

"The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling."

"In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that provide energy and creativity."

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

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, we feel a responsibility for the actions of others."

"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, but they may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game."

"Your silence will not protect you from the consequences of speaking your truth, but your voice might protect someone else."

"When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid."

"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."

"I am deliberate and afraid of nothing."

"Poetry is not a luxury. For women, poetry is as necessary as breathing."

"The inadequacies of others seem to take so much of the definition of our lives."

"We must use what we have to invent what we need."

"Deep change always means loss, something has to be given up."

"If I could simply turn a blind eye to injustice, perhaps I could find peace more easily."

"The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation and that always seems laden with danger."

"We were never meant to survive. And yet we do."

"Anger expressed and translated into meaningful action has a long history of bringing change."

"Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference."

"If we don't define ourselves for ourselves, we will be crushed into other people's fantasies of us and eaten alive."

"The quality of light by which we regard our lives has direct bearing on the quality of the lives we lead."

"Love is a lot like a back that goes out. It can happen to anyone and when it happens you know it."

"Our labor has already been expended. Invest in the results of our sweat and thought."

"There are no new ideas, only new ways of making them felt."

"When I was growing up, Black was not beautiful. I was not beautiful."

"Anger is an appropriate response to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change."

"The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference."