Life & Wisdom Quote by Audre Lorde

Urgency is Lorde's native tense. "Life is very short" isn't a Hallmark shrug; it's a pressure point, a reminder that time is not evenly distributed and never has been. For a Black lesbian feminist poet writing through the grind of racism, sexism, homophobia, and later cancer, "short" carries real statistics and lived precarity. The line sounds simple because Lorde is doing something strategic: stripping away the alibis. If you keep waiting for a cleaner moment, a safer platform, a better mood, you've already chosen the status quo.

"What we have to do" is deliberately unspecific. Lorde doesn't name the task because she assumes you already know it. The moral homework is personal and political at once: speak the truth you keep sanding down to be palatable; confront the structures you benefit from; make the art that scares you; love with clarity; build coalition without erasing difference. That vagueness is an invitation and an indictment. If the "have to" hits you, it's because it's yours.

"Must be done in the now" rejects the seductive liberal myth of gradual progress, the idea that justice will ripen on its own if we keep our hands clean. Lorde's "now" is also a rebuke to respectability and silence - the coping mechanisms that pass for survival but quietly extend harm. The sentence works because it's both compassionate and merciless: it understands fatigue, then refuses to let fatigue become a philosophy. In Lorde's world, postponement isn't neutrality; it's participation.