Lorde Quotes

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

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

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

Silence has never brought us anything of worth.

I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.

Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures.

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

I am a reflection of my mother’s secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers

Raising Black children-female and male-in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive.

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

Some words live in my throat breeding like adders. Others know sun seeking like gypsies over my tongue to explode through my lips

Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.

. . . it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are-until the poem-nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.

But, on the other hand, I get bored with racism too and recognize that there are still many things to be said about a Black person and a White person loving each other in a racist society.

stoicism and silence does not serve us nor our communities, only the forces of things as they are.

We're bigger than we ever dreamed, and I'm in love with being queen.

Poetry is not a luxury.

I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast.

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

If you don’t define yourself for yourself then you will be crushed into other's fantasies of you and eaten alive

There is no Hierarchy of Oppressions

Silence and invisibility go hand in hand with powerlessness.

Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away.

And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

We're supposed to see "universal" love as heterosexual. What I insist upon in my work is that there is no such thing as universal love in literature.

Not in the swing of things but what I really mean is not in the swing of things yet

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.

When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.

To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society

My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I'm going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity.

Hopefully, we can learn from the 60s that we cannot afford to do our enemies work by destroying each other.

We are powerful because we have survived

The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival.

When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I'm not excluding you from the joining - I'm broadening the joining.

In discussions around the hiring and firing of Black faculty at universities, the charge is frequently heard that Black women are more easily hired than are Black men.

We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.

I am Black because I come from the earth's inside now take my word for jewel in the open light.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.

Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.

Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care.

The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.

Women are powerful and dangerous.

There is a timbre of voice that comes from not being heard and knowing / you are not being heard / noticed only by others / not heard for the same reason.

I can't really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too?

The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself.

We must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply and so many of our old ideas disparage.

Taylor Swift is so flawless, and so unattainable, and I don't think it's breeding anything good in young girls.

So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.

Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action.