Art & Creativity Quote by Audre Lorde

Lorde isn’t offering comfort; she’s issuing a tactical directive. The opening clause, "I write for those women who do not speak", positions poetry as infrastructure, not ornament: language as a bridge to people systematically cut off from public speech. But she refuses the easy romance of "giving voice". Instead, she names why the voice is missing: terror, training, and a culture that treats fear as wisdom. That pivot - "because we are taught" - implicates institutions and intimacies alike: family, school, church, the workplace, the very scripts of femininity. Silence isn’t a personal flaw; it’s a curriculum.

The line "respect fear more than ourselves" is a brutal reframing. Respect is usually reserved for authority, elders, rules. Lorde exposes how oppression hijacks that moral vocabulary, turning fear into something you honor, defer to, organize your life around. Then she lands the sentence that makes the whole passage combustible: "We've been taught that silence would save us, but it won't". It reads like a proverb, but it’s anti-proverbial: a corrective to survival advice handed down between women, especially those punished for being "too much" - too loud, too Black, too queer, too angry.

Context matters. Lorde wrote out of the Black feminist, lesbian, and anti-racist movements of the 1970s and 80s, where speaking up carried real costs: professional exile, violence, medical neglect, state surveillance. The subtext is unsentimental: silence is not neutrality. It’s exposure. Speech, for Lorde, is not safe - it’s necessary.