Life & Wisdom Quote by Audre Lorde

Originality is a cheap god in a culture that rewards novelty the way it rewards youth: loudly, briefly, and often dishonestly. Audre Lorde’s line punctures that economy by relocating creative power from invention to impact. “There are no new ideas” isn’t defeatism; it’s a refusal to play the elitist game where only the unprecedented counts as valuable. Lorde, a Black lesbian feminist poet writing against the tidy myths of “progress,” suggests that the real battleground is sensation and recognition: what people can be made to feel, and therefore finally confront.

The second sentence does the work. “Only new ways of making them felt” makes feeling a political technology, not a private mood. Lorde’s poetry and essays insist that emotions - anger, grief, erotic knowledge - are not distractions from thought but vehicles for it, especially for those whom institutions train to be “reasonable” at the cost of their own reality. The subtext is an argument about access: if certain ideas (freedom, equality, safety, dignity) keep getting “rediscovered,” it’s because the dominant culture keeps numbing itself to them. Power doesn’t just suppress ideas; it anesthetizes.

Context matters here: Lorde wrote in a period when feminist and civil rights language risked becoming slogan, when movements could calcify into rhetoric that sounded radical but landed softly. She pushes artists and organizers toward form, voice, and embodiment - not to mint new concepts, but to pierce the deadened surface so old truths register like a bruise.