If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. (From "Poetry is Not a Luxury")
Interpretation
Dreaming is essential for empowerment and the future, and dismissing it undermines our essence.
In this quote, Audre Lorde emphasizes the vital role that dreams and aspirations play in energizing and empowering individuals, particularly women. She argues that when society views the act of dreaming as a mere luxury, it undermines the foundational strength and potential that dreams provide, ultimately jeopardizing the future and vitality of communities.
In practice
This quote can inspire a women's empowerment workshop.
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 knife of corruption endangered the life of New York City. The scalpel of the law is making us well again.
In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
Why do we argue? Life's so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.
There has never been a truly selfless rebel, just hypocrites—conscious hypocrites or unconscious hypocrites, it’s all the same.
If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.
Virtue is its own reward, and brings with it the truest and highest pleasure; but if we cultivate it only for pleasure's sake, we are selfish, not religious, and will never gain the pleasure, because we can never have the virtue.
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