Audre Lorde Quotes

It's necessary to use suffering. Otherwise, one is used by it.

By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.

We do not suffer by accident.

You can't avoid pain, but you can choose to overcome it.

There's no way that I know of to avoid pain absolutely, but suffering is the interpretation we choose to place on the pain we encounter.

When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.

Suffering brings your heart to bear. It gets you where you are!

You're not going to live your life unscathed.

I've been through so much stuff that I hope even my enemies wouldn't have to go through.

Everybody's darkness is different. My darkness came from my mom having pancreatitis and almost dyin'. And what I noticed was that the darkness ain't goin' nowhere.

There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specifications, becomes, inevitably, just pain.

There are those who suffer and grow strong; there are those who suffer and grow weak. This mystery of pain is still for me the saddest of earth's disabilities.

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.

You believe you could not live with the pain. Such pain is not lived with. It is only endured. I am sorry.

Don’t worry about me handling the pain," I say. "I’ve had a lot of practice.

Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.

Pain in all its forms is also a message, a kind of distress signal to our hearts and minds. There are times when it's really important to tune into that message and just listen to it.

The pain is unrelenting; one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.

Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures... There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.

Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone. You must hurt or be hurt.

We relate all our afflictions more frequently than we do our pleasures.

Pain is inevitable. Misery is optional

What hurts us is what heals us.

Sometimes the problem outshines the pain.