Audre Lorde

"Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done."

"For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive."

"There are so many silences to be broken."

"Visibility is a trap that we do not have to take; it is an anchorless chain."

"The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot."

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, we feel them vibrate."

"Anger between peers can be清ed, redirected back into hope or changed into something else."

"I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself."

"The need to revolutionize ourselves does not mean we do not accomplish revolutionary change, but it does mean we must change how we go about accomplishing change."

"For Black women, our struggle has not been to emerge from silence into speech, but to change the terms upon which we are heard."

"Each of us carries around those growing up years, valuable seeds still waiting after all this time to take root and flower whenever finally given a chance."

"When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent we are still afraid."

"To believe in nothing is to believe in the worst."

"If what we need to dream, we have to go out and make it real in the world."

"Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave."

"We must recognize and embrace the fact that the emotional and sensual are not enemies of the intellect."

"I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the way."

"The terms upon which any of us comes to power is so full of compromises, whole terms, conditions, lies."

"Fear is not something to be done away with, but something to be used, to be altered."

"My work is to speak the truth about the human condition as I experience it in my body."

"Sisters in struggle, we're not supposed to be what they want us to be."

"To touch the erotic is to come into contact with the depth of my feeling."

"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 they physically feel and do."

"We cannot grow as people or as a movement if we are imprisoned by fear."

"Caring for myself is not indulgence, it is survival."

"Longing and desire are powerful allies in pursuing the changes we wish to create."

"I write for those women whose voices have been silenced by time, distance, and oppression."

"Black women have always been at the forefront, defining ourselves and claiming our own power."

"The possible shapes of our tomorrows depend upon what we choose to do today."

"We are not responsible for completing the work, but neither are we free to abandon it."