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 most common cause of fear of old age is associated with the possibility of poverty.
I gotta big mouth, I can't help it, I talk from my heart, I'm real, whatever comes comes. But my controversy problem, it's not my fault, I try to find my way in the world you know, I try to be somebody instead of just make money off of everybody. So I go down paths that haven't been traveled before and I usually mess up, but I learn, I come back stronger.
I think we've debunked the myth of talent. It doesn't appear that there's anything like a music gene or center in the brain that Stevie Wonder has that nobody else has.
Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he's well dressed. There ain't much credit in that.
A man must not always tell all, for that be folly; but what a man says should be what he thinks.
I hated my part in the charade of murder and horror. My efforts were contributing to the deaths, to the burning alive of children - especially the children. The photographs of young Vietnamese children burned by napalm destroyed me.
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