Audre Lorde Quotes

The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.

To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefor unloveable. Loneliness is a taste of death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget the inner pain.

She's letting out her feelings. The scary thing is not being able to do that. When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you're in big trouble.

Art is only a way of expressing pain.

I'm not going to stop torturing myself till I figure out the cause of my pain.

I had wanted to say that my song was far too painful to sing.

I thought that jealousy was an idea. It isn't. It's a pain. But I didn't feel as they do in a Broadway melodrama. I didn't want to kill anybody. I just wanted to die.

Suppressing your hurts is like not tending to a bullet wound. Eventually you will bleed out. Dont numb pain, express it.

Parminder kept her unwept tears locked tightly inside where they seemed to undergo an alchemical transformation, returning to the outer world as lava slides of rage.

I wonder if any of them can tell from just looking at me that all I am is the sum total of my pain, a raw woundedness so extreme that it might be terminal. It might be terminal velocity, the speed of the sound of a girl falling down to a place from where she can't be retrieved. What if I am stuck down here for good?

It is purposeless to tell Negroes they should not be enraged when they should be. Indeed, they will be mentally healthier if they do not suppress rage, but vent it constructively and use its energy peacefully but forcefully to cripple the operations of an oppressive society. Civil disobedience can utilize the militance wasted in riots to seize clothes or groceries many do not even want.

It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.

He who bears injustice alone is terrible to behold.

Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.

The body knows no pain, not like the soul. At least a nerve has limits, a body part a name. But the soul... the soul... There is no bandage - even crying is in vain.

People cannot win against their loneliness because loneliness is this world’s worst kind of pain.

How can you write if you can't cry?

If you're aware of injustice, you can either ignore it, say there is nothing you can do about it, complain about it and not do anything, or put your energies into doing something about it.

Holding a tear back makes them drain upward, higher and higher, until one day your head just explodes and you're left with a stub of a neck and nothing more.

Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron ... Like physical pain that becomes chronic, it is miserable not so much because it is intolerable in the moment as because it is intolerable to have known it in the moments gone and to look forward only to knowing it in the moments to come.

What motivates me is the desire to bring up a whole new generation of active citizens who believe in peace and social justice and will work for it.

Even though it hurt, there are kinds of pain you couldn't speak out loud.

I talk openly about my past and what I've gone through - abuse being something that was very real in my household, and a lot of chaos growing up as a child. I think that I naturally just gravitated towards music that I could really feel on a deep level - and that meant sadness. I was able to connect with that at a really young age.

I feel pain everyday of my life. When you see me perform, it's that pain you're seeing coming out. I put all my emotions, all my feelings, and my body on the line. People hurt me, I hurt myself - mentally, physically

Everyone understands the pain that accompanies death, but genuine pain doesn't live in the spirit, nor in the air, nor in our lives, nor on these terraces of billowing smoke. The genuine pain that keeps everything awake is a tiny, infinite burn on the innocent eyes of other systems.