Audre Lorde Silence Quotations

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

... it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.

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.

I was going to die, if not sooner, then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation .

Silence has never brought us anything of worth.

silence and invisibility go hand in hand with powerlessness ...

What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?

For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

There are many lesbians and gay men trapped by their fear into silence and invisibility, and they exist in a dim valley of terror wearing nooses of conformity.

stoicism and silence does not serve us nor our communities, only the forces of things as they are.