Book Notes: The Selected Works Of Audre Lorde

Book Highlights

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.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men.

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?

For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson — that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not.

And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective.

In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.

Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.

“What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary, a meditating gunrunner?”

Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.

Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. […] Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees.

Afraid is a country where they issue us passports at birth and hope we never seek citizenship in any other country.

My poems are filled with blood these days because the future is so bloody. When the blood of four-year-old children runs unremarked through the alleys of Soweto, how can I pretend that sweetness is anything more than armor and ammunition in an ongoing war?

This is why the work is so important. Its power doesn’t lie in the me that lives in the words so much as in the heart’s blood pumping behind the eye that is reading, the muscle behind the desire that is sparked by the word—hope as a living state that propels us, open-eyed and fearful, into all [of] the battles of our lives. And some of those battles we do not win. But some of them we do.

I thought of the African way of perceiving life, as experience to be lived rather than as problem to be solved.

I move through a terrible and invigorating savor of now—a visceral awareness of the passage of time, with its nightmare and its energy.

[…] the avid insistence of detail pretending insight or information

Your hunger for rectitude blossoms into rage