Lorde Quotes

... it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.

I am still learning - how to take joy in all the people I am, how to use all my selves in the service of what I believe, how to accept when I fail and rejoice when I succeed.

In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.

Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.

I started writing because I had a need inside of me to create something that was not there

Glory and gore go hand in hand.

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.

Art is not living. It is the use of living. The artist has the ability to take the living and use it in a certain way and produce art.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence.

Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.

What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?

You cannot use someone else's fire. You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it.

Every Black woman in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers.

We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.

Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

Don't let some random comment that you wouldn't have even thought about overshadow something important that you were actually trying to say.

I'm terrified of growing up. Once you become an adult, how to you step back from that? It's something that wakes me up at night.

It's a new art form, showing people how little we care.

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

What I do is so important to me. It’s like being a parent, in some ways, of a super-demanding , high-achieving child, with a cry that sounds really cool on the radio.

The way I dress and carry myself, a lot of people find it intimidating. I think my whole career can be boiled down to the one word I always say in meetings: strength.

I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.

Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.

David Bowie told me my music sounds like tomorrow

Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.

Don't be afraid. Be the kind of person your mother warned you about.

Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us, wherever and however we are standing, in whatever arena we choose.

What do we want from each other after we have told our stories

I believe one of the hardest things you can do is conquer your fears, but if you have a goal, then it's your job to open up and let it be real no matter how scary it seems.

Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer.

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.

The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those boundaries.

Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.

Anger is loaded with information and energy.

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation.

Self-care is not about self-indulgence , it is about self-preservati on.

How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live unblinded? How much of this pain can I use?

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

I do not need someone to complete me, but if you wanted to, we could walk next to each other into whatever is coming next.

I love thrift shopping. You can get ten things because everything costs, like, three dollars.

The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation .

Art is not living. It is the use of living.

Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action.

to that piece in each of us that refuses to be silent.

Does anything really matter? We all end up in the same place. All that's left is our Wikipedia entry.

The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.

The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.