It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we'll make it.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of resilience and knowledge transfer for collective survival and progress.
Audre Lorde's quote suggests that individual experiences can serve as powerful metaphors for broader societal issues. By advocating for resilience and the sharing of knowledge, she highlights the potential for groups—be they people, races, or genders—to thrive through adversity if they persist and educate one another.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges in a community setting.
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.
The busy man is never wise and the wise man is never busy.
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
Get someone else to blow your horn and the sound will carry twice as far.
He will easily be content and at peace, whose conscience is pure.
All I know from my own experience is that the more loss we feel the more grateful we should be for whatever it was we had to lose. It means that we had something worth grieving for. The ones I'm sorry for are the ones that go through life not knowing what grief is.
God never promises to remove us from our struggles. He does promise, however, to change the way we look at them.
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