Audre Lorde Quotes About Giving

Quotes about: Giving

• 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.

  Audre Lorde

  Motivation, Reality, Self

• . . . it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are-until the poem-nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.

  Audre Lorde

  Names, Ideas, Giving

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.36, Crossing Press

• 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.

  Audre Lorde

  Rocks, Names, Giving

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.37, Crossing Press

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

  Audre Lorde

  Names, Giving, Way

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.37, Crossing Press

• 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.

  Audre Lorde

  Pain, Powerful, Giving

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.132, Crossing Press

• If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. (From "Poetry is Not a Luxury")

  Audre Lorde

  Dream, Giving Up, Moving

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.39, Crossing Press

• ... 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.

  Audre Lorde

  Dream, Names, Ideas

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.37, Crossing Press

• It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.

  Audre Lorde

  Destiny, Luxury, Giving

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.54, Crossing Press

• In other words, I would be giving in to a myth of sameness which I think can destroy us.

  Audre Lorde

  Thinking, Giving, Would Be

  Audre Lorde, Joan Wylie Hall (2004). “Conversations with Audre Lorde”, p.86, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• 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. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt.

  Audre Lorde

  Light, Illumination, Names

  Audre Lorde (2012). “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”, p.36, Crossing Press

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