At Portland's Womyn's March yesterday, more than one speaker quoted Audre Lorde, inspiring me to do the same today. — Molly
I Have a Duty to Speak the Truth and
Other Quotes by Audre Lorde
Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human difference between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.
I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.
When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.
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.
We have been raised to fear the yes in ourselves, our deepest cravings.
...oppression is as American as apple pie...
Your silence will not protect you.
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.
Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly "inferior" capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.
Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.
Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.
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.
Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time, and the arena, and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle where we are standing.
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.
The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations that we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us.
Revolution is not a one-time event.
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.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side.
I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes--everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!
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 through the rain.
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence.
My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.
Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.
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.
Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end. And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.
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.
Who I am is what fulfills me and what fulfills the vision I have of a world.
Our visions begin with our desires.
As we come to know, accept, and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas—the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.
To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society.
Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded.
— Audre Lorde
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