AUDRE LORDE

But the question is a matter of the survival and the teaching. That's what our work comes down to. No matter where we key into it, it's the same work, just different pieces of ourselves doing it.

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

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

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 key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

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.

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

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.

It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we'll make it.

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

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

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

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

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.

There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.

You know how fighting fish do it? They blow bubbles and in each one of those bubbles is an egg and they float the egg up to the surface. They keep this whole heavy nest of eggs floating, and they're constantly repairing it. It's as if they live in both elements.

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.

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

I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.

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.

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 I use my strength in the service of my vision it makes no difference whether or not I am afraid.

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.

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.

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.

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