Talk:Audre Lorde

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• It is not our differences that divide us. it is our inability to recognize, accept & celebrate those differences.
  • [1] says this is from Our Dead Behind Us: Poems -- Beland (talk) 04:11, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

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

• We are powerful because we have survived.

• The erotic cannot be felt secondhand.

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

• If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

• We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.

• For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

• Once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy.

• 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.

• 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.

• Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded.

• Our visions begin with our desires.

• For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. 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.