"I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood"
About this Quote
Lorde isn’t selling confession as a lifestyle accessory; she’s issuing a survival directive. The engine of this line is repetition - "over and over again" - a phrase that reads like hard-earned data, not a single epiphany. Experience keeps re-teaching the same lesson: what matters most doesn’t stay safe just because it stays silent. Silence only guarantees one outcome, and it isn’t protection.
The sentence builds a moral hierarchy with teeth: "what is most important to me" must be "spoken". Not expressed, not hinted at, not privately cherished. Spoken. Made verbal. Shared. Lorde stacks verbs to show the labor involved: turning feeling into language is work, and turning language into public truth is risk. That risk is named with an unusually tender violence: "bruised or misunderstood". Bruising suggests contact, pressure, mishandling - the inevitable damage that happens when something soft meets a world that isn’t. Misunderstanding isn’t presented as a tragic exception; it’s the cover charge for being legible.
Context matters because Lorde’s stakes weren’t abstract. As a Black lesbian feminist poet moving through institutions built to discount her, she understood how silence is often marketed to marginalized people as "dignity" or "prudence" while functioning as erasure. The subtext is strategic: if power depends on your quiet, then speech becomes resistance, even when imperfect. The quote refuses the fantasy of flawless communication; it argues for testimony anyway. In Lorde’s universe, being bruised is not the opposite of being safe. It’s evidence you showed up.
The sentence builds a moral hierarchy with teeth: "what is most important to me" must be "spoken". Not expressed, not hinted at, not privately cherished. Spoken. Made verbal. Shared. Lorde stacks verbs to show the labor involved: turning feeling into language is work, and turning language into public truth is risk. That risk is named with an unusually tender violence: "bruised or misunderstood". Bruising suggests contact, pressure, mishandling - the inevitable damage that happens when something soft meets a world that isn’t. Misunderstanding isn’t presented as a tragic exception; it’s the cover charge for being legible.
Context matters because Lorde’s stakes weren’t abstract. As a Black lesbian feminist poet moving through institutions built to discount her, she understood how silence is often marketed to marginalized people as "dignity" or "prudence" while functioning as erasure. The subtext is strategic: if power depends on your quiet, then speech becomes resistance, even when imperfect. The quote refuses the fantasy of flawless communication; it argues for testimony anyway. In Lorde’s universe, being bruised is not the opposite of being safe. It’s evidence you showed up.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|---|
| Source | Audre Lorde, essay "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action", in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984). |
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