Life & Wisdom Quote by Audre Lorde

Lorde’s line slices cleanly through a comforting myth: that art is life itself, a kind of purified existence we can retreat into. “Art is not living” is a refusal of aesthetic escapism, but also a warning against confusing representation with survival. For Lorde, who wrote out of Black, feminist, lesbian experience under constant social pressure, living is not a metaphor; it’s a political condition with material stakes. Art doesn’t substitute for that. It draws from it.

The second sentence is the pressure point: “It is the use of living.” Lorde turns art from sacred object into instrument. “Use” sounds almost utilitarian, even bluntly transactional, and that’s the point. She frames art as a practice of extraction and transformation: the days you’ve endured, the love you’ve risked, the fear you’ve swallowed, the anger you’ve earned. Art is what you do with that lived substance, not what replaces it. The subtext is a challenge to institutions that consume “voices” while leaving the people behind them unsupported: if art feeds on living, then the conditions of living matter ethically.

Contextually, Lorde’s work insists that language is a technology of survival, not a decorative flourish. This line also doubles as an instruction to artists: don’t romanticize suffering, don’t fetishize the “creative life” as if it absolves you from showing up in the real one. Make something, yes, but recognize what you’re spending to make it.