The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
Interpretation
The quote explores the relationship between self-identity and powerful emotions.
Audre Lorde suggests that the erotic, or deep emotional and sensual experiences, serves as a bridge connecting our understanding of who we are with the tumultuous nature of our most intense feelings. This connection emphasizes the importance of embracing our desires and emotions as integral parts of our identity and experience, rather than merely chaotic forces to be controlled or suppressed.
In practice
In a discussion about emotional intelligence, this quote can highlight the significance of understanding our feelings in relation to self-identity.
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.
To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.
To write an autobiography, you've got to expose other people. I hope to get out of this world as gracefully as possible, without embarrassing anyone.
I am at war with the living, I have come to terms with the dead.
I have a collective sense of suffering.
Here, everything is tragic through and through, and the will, that fain would shape a world according to its wish, at last can reach no greater satisfaction than the breaking of itself in dignified annulment.
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