Audre Lorde Quotes About Survival
-
I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.
→ -
The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival.
→ -
Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.
→ -
Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged... We have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression... Survival is learning to take our difference and make them strengths.
→ -
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.
→ -
To face the realities of our lives is not a reason for despair-despair is a tool of your enemies. Facing the realities of our lives gives us motivation for action. For you are not powerless... You know why the hard questions must be asked. It is not altruism, it is self-preservation-survival.
→ -
... 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.
→ -
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.
→ -
I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk throught the rain.
→ -
Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill...For the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change.
→
Related Authors
-
Judith Butler Philosopher -
Patricia Hill Collins Professor -
Angela Davis Political Activist -
Mary Daly Philosopher -
Adrienne Rich Poet -
Toni Morrison Novelist -
Anne Sexton Poet -
Cherrie Moraga Writer -
Gloria Steinem Journalist -
James A. Baldwin Novelist -
Maya Angelou Author -
June Jordan Poet -
Gloria E. Anzaldúa Scholar -
Alice Walker Author -
Bell Hooks Author -
Barbara Smith Author -
Bayard Rustin Activist -
Lorde Singer-songwriter -
Pat Parker Poet -
Zora Neale Hurston Anthropologist