Audre Lorde

"I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared even when I fear the response."

"It is not what we do that makes us powerful, it is our willingness to do it."

"Learning to ask for what I need is a form of self-love."

"Visibility is a trap; it always exposes you to the implements of control of any society."

"Black women are expected to use their psychic and physical energy to nurture others, with little expectation that they will be nurtured."

"We have all been brought up to fear insanity slightly, and to madness not at all."

"Who pays the price for my sister's silence? Who pays for the way I am afraid to speak openly about myself?"

"Our visions begin with our desires rather than our dreams, perhaps that is the difference."

"The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them."

"I have scar tissue where I used to have open wounds, and that is called healing."

"Each of us is here for a reason and each of us has work to do."

"We cannot live without our lives."

"The capacity to feel deeply is a strength, not a weakness."

"My greatest responsibility is to myself and to my own freedom of thought."

"Advocating for the human rights of others is not a distraction from our own liberation."

"To create is to relate, and relating is in itself creative."

"We are powerful not because we never struggled, but because we never stopped struggling."

"The most general definition of evil is an absence of response."

"It is a waste of time hating a mirror or its reflection."

"I believe that all poetry is self-revelation rather than self-aggrandizement."

"Community is how you survive really. Village. Not its close to meaning just Village."

"The most profound difference between us lies in what we choose to fight for and what we choose to fight about."

"Dreams are illustrated novels, not simple stories we can recount."

"We are never really ready, and perhaps that is not the point."

"Taking care of ourselves does not mean screaming into the void; it means reflecting back what we know of ourselves and our struggles."

"The work of self-examination is never complete, it is ongoing."

"It is easier to accept injustice than to fight it, and that is precisely why the struggle continues."

"The extent to which I can feel myself, know myself, see myself, determines the extent to which I can truly see you."

"Art cannot be separated from politics, and never has been."

"We learn to accept the unacceptable, and that is when the struggle truly begins."