Audre Lorde

"The future is indeed female."

"We are meant to do difficult things."

"To be conscious in a system of oppression is to be lonely."

"But we were never really alone."

"We stand together, more powerful than we ever were alone."

"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 for change."

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

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

"Self-care is not selfish. You cannot serve from an empty vessel."

"There is no such thing as a safe oppression."

"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."

"Your silence will not protect you, but your voice might protect others."

"I am deliberate and afraid of nothing."

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow human beings; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, we feel all their joys and sorrows."

"Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence."

"Black and lesbian and woman—all three have been ways of being on the outside of power."

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

"The very house we live in is made of all the histories we don't even know about."

"We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition."

"It is a short step from celebration to self-congratulation, and self-congratulation is the poison of revolution."

"Our feelings are our most genuine paths of knowledge."

"We must be willing to acknowledge the pain within us, not to be overwhelmed by it but to learn from it."

"If you are not willing to do the work of recognizing the distortions within yourself, you will project them outward onto others."

"The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation and that always carries a fearful charge."

"Love is a physical thing. It can be measured in how we touch, how we listen, how we show up for one another."

"Institutionalized rejection of difference is a matter of survival for those with power."

"Deep change requires in-depth honesty about who we've been and what we've accepted."

"We cannot afford to be separate. We cannot afford to be silent about those places where we are different."

"The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what lies between them."