If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.
Category Archive: Audre Lorde
When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.
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.
The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.
In other words, I would be giving in to a myth of sameness which I think can destroy us.
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
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 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.
Our visions begin with our desires.
There are lesbians, God knows… if you came up through lesbian circles in the forties and fifties in New York… who were not feminist and would not call themselves feminists.