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I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings QUOTES

I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings QUOTES

1 " Each of us is called upon to take a stand. So in these days ahead, as we examine ourselves and each other, our works, our fears, our differences, our sisterhood and survivals, I urge you to tackle what is most difficult for us all, self-scrutiny of our complacencies, the idea that since each of us believes she is on the side of right, she need not examine her position. "

― Audre Lorde , I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings

2 " It is not the destiny of Black america to repeat white america's mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life. "

― Audre Lorde , I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings

3 " What happens when you narrow your definition to what is convenient, or what is fashionable, or what is expected, is dishonesty by silence. "

― Audre Lorde , I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings

4 " We cannot love ‘our people’ unless we love each of us ourselves, unless I love each piece of myself, those I wish to keep and those I wish to change—for survival is the ability to encompass difference, to encompass change without destruction. "

― Audre Lorde , I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings

5 " When you read the words of Langston Hughes you are reading the words of a Black Gay man. When you read the words of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Angelina Weld Grimké, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, you are reading the words of Black Lesbians. When you listen to the life-affirming voices of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, you are hearing Black Lesbian women. When you see the plays and read the words of Lorraine Hansberry, you are reading the words of a women who loved women deeply. "

― Audre Lorde , I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings

6 " All of our children are prey. How do we raise them not to prey upon themselves and each other? And this is why we cannot be silent, because our silences will come to testify against us out of the mouths of our children. "

― Audre Lorde , I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings

7 " It was hard but very strengthening to remember that I could silent my whole life long and then be dead, flat out, and never have said or done what I wanted to do, what I needed to do, because of fear of pain, fear…If I waited to be right before I spoke, I would be sending little cryptic messages on the Ouija board, complaints from the other side. "

― Audre Lorde , I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings

8 " I heard my old friend Clem’s voice coming back to me through the dimness of thirty years: “I see you coming here trying to make sense where there is no sense. Try just living in it. Respond, alter, see what happens.” I thought of the African way of perceiving life, as experience to be lived rather than as problem to be solved. "

― Audre Lorde , I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings

9 " The terror of Black Lesbians is buried in that deep inner place where we have been taught to fear all difference—to kill or ignore it. Be assured: loving women is not a communicable disease. You don’t catch it like the common cold. "

― Audre Lorde , I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings

10 " I sit before the typewriter and nothing comes. If feels as if underlining these assaults, lining them up one after the other and looking at them squarely might give them an unbearable power. Yet, I know that the opposite is true-no matter how difficult it may be to look at the realities of our lives, it is there that we will find the strength to change them. And to suppress any truth is to give it power beyond endurance. "

― Audre Lorde , I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings

11 " Much of the gay white movement seeks to be included in the american dream and is angered when they do not receive the standard white male privileges, misnamed as “american democracy”. Often, white gay men are working not to change the system. This is one the reasons why the gay male movement is as white as it is. Black gay men recognize, again by the facts of survival, that being Black, they are not going to be included in the same way. "

― Audre Lorde , I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings

12 " Sadomasochism is an institutionalized celebration of dominant/subordinate relationships. And it prepares us either to accept subordination or to enforce dominance. Even in play, to affirm that the exertion of power over powerlessness is erotic, empowering, is to set the emotional and social stage for the continuation of that relationship, politically, socially, and economically. Sadomasochism feeds the belief that domination is inevitable and legitimately enjoyable. "

― Audre Lorde , I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings

13 " Black Lesbians are not a threat to the Black family. Many of us have families of our own. We are not white, and we are not a disease. We are women who love women. This does not mean we are going to assault your daughters in an alley on Nostrand Avenue. It does not mean we only think about sex, any more than you only think about sex. Even if you do believe any of these stereotypes about Black Lesbians, begin to practice acting like you don’t believe them. "

― Audre Lorde , I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings

14 " And it is upon our ability to look honestly upon our differences, to see them as creative rather than divisive, that our future success may lie. "

― Audre Lorde , I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings

15 "

I have heard it said—usually behind my back—that Black Lesbians are not normal. But what is normal in this deranged society by which we are all trapped? I remember, and so do many of you, when being Black was considered not normal, when they talked about us in whispers, tried to paint us, lynch us, bleach us, ignore us, pretend we did not exist. We called that racism.


I have heard it said that Black Lesbians are a threat to the Black family. But when 50 percent of children born to Black women are born out of wedlock, and 30 percent of all Black families are headed by women without husbands, we need to broaden and redefine what we mean by family.


I have heard it said that Black Lesbians will mean the death of the race. Yet Black Lesbians bear children in exactly the same way other women bear children, and a Lesbian household is simply another kind of family. Ask my son and daughter.

"

― Audre Lorde , I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings

16 " I feel not to be open about who I am in all respects places a certain kind of expectation on me I’m just not into meeting any more. "

― Audre Lorde , I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings

17 " The linkage of passion to dominance/subordination is the prototype of the heterosexual image of male-female relationships, one which justifies pornography. Women are supposed to love being brutalized. This is also the prototypical justification of all relationships of oppression—that the subordinate one who is “different” enjoys the inferior position. "

― Audre Lorde , I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings