Thread by @eveewing

Something I've wanted to do for a while is share some quotes from Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde so here they are in a thread. cop the book! Happy #WomensHistoryMonth

"[W]hen you find people who start from a position where human beings are at the core, as opposed to a position where profit is at the core, the solutions can be very different." - Audre Lorde

"[M]ost people--certainly most Black people-- are on a breadconcern level...If you conquer the bread problem, that gives you at least a chance to look around at the others." - Audre Lorde

"Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought." this is from "Poetry Is Not A Luxury" which I have said before many times that you should read and here I am saying it again. It's short and so good.

"There are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves-- along with the renewed courage to try them out." -Audre Lorde

"For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive." - Audre Lorde

"Kept around us as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men."
- Audre Lorde

"I was going to die, if not sooner than later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you." From "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action" which you should also google & read immediately

"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." - Audre Lorde

"Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak." - Audre Lorde

"The development of self-defined Black women, ready to explore and pursue our power and interests within our communities, is a vital component in the war for Black liberation." - Audre Lorde

"[There is a] false notion that there is only a limited and particular amount of freedom that must be divided up between us, with the largest and juiciest pieces of liberty going as spoils to the victor or the stronger." - Audre Lorde

"Black feminism is not white feminism in blackface."
[pauses typing to holler before continuing]
Black women have particular and legitimate issues which affect our lives as Black women, and addressing those issues does not make us any less Black."
- Audre Lorde

"Black feminists speak as women because we are women and do not need others to speak for us. It is for Black men to speak up and tell us why and how their manhood is so threatened that Black women should be the prime targets of their justifiable rage." - Audre Lorde

"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

[pauses typing to holler again]

"The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those differences.... For then beyond sisterhood is still racism." - Audre Lorde

"Frequently, when speaking with men and white women, I am reminded of how difficult and time-consuming it is to have to reinvent the pencil every time you want to send a message." -Audre Lorde

[falls on floor]
[gets back up to resume typing]

"Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women - in the face of tremendous resistance - as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies & a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought."

"Traditionally, in american society, it is the members of oppressed, objectified groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of our oppressor." - Audre Lorde

"Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them. In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes."
- Audre Lorde

"Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be down between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper."

"Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying."

"I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. 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." - Audre Lorde

"If I speak to you in anger, at least I have spoken to you: I have not put a gun to your head and shot you down in the street; I have not looked at your bleeding sister's body and asked, 'What did she do to deserve it?'" - Audre Lorde

"Black women are expected to use our anger only in the service of other people's salvation or learning. But that time is over." - Audre Lorde

"We forget that the necessary ingredient needed to make the past work for the future is our energy in the present, metabolizing one into the other." - Audre Lorde

"There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. Malcolm knew this. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this. Our struggles are particular, but we are not alone." - Audre Lorde

"Survival is not a theory. In what way do I contribute to the subjugation of any part of those who I define as my people?" - Audre Lorde

"Each of us must find our work and do it. Militancy no longer means guns at high noon, if it ever did. It means actively working for change, sometimes in the absence of any surety that change is coming." - Audre Lorde

"What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other & to work toward that future w/ the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order to do this we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness."

"Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me." - Audre Lorde

... okay I think I'm done! For now! Again, everything in this thread is from Sister Outsider, which is a collection of essays and speeches by Audre Lorde. Check it out.