Love & Passion Quote by Audre Lorde

Lorde’s sentence moves like a fuse: it starts at the scale of the self, then insists the self is never the whole story. “Take that as a personal metaphor” is an invitation, but also a warning against the liberal comfort of private interpretation. Yes, the individual life can be read symbolically; the point is to “multiply it” outward, until it names a people, a race, a sex, a time. That verb matters. Multiplication isn’t vague solidarity or a sentimental “we’re all connected.” It’s replication under pressure: one person’s survival tactics becoming communal technology.

The subtext is Lorde’s lifelong argument that experience is political material, and that oppression is experienced as both intimate and structural. She’s writing from the heat of late-20th-century Black feminist thought, where the personal is a battleground and “metaphor” isn’t decoration but a way to smuggle truth past institutions trained to dismiss it. Even the grammar rejects comfort. “If we can keep this thing going long enough” sounds almost improvisational, like a band trying not to lose the groove. Beneath it is the reality of exhaustion, surveillance, erasure, illness, burnout: survival as a continuous practice, not a triumphant event.

Then the hinge: “survive and teach what we know.” Lorde makes endurance inseparable from transmission. Knowledge hoarded is useless; knowledge taught becomes lineage. “We’ll make it” lands bluntly, unromantic. Not victory, not purity, just arrival. The ambition isn’t to be redeemed by history; it’s to outlast what wants you silent.