Life & Wisdom Quote by Audre Lorde

Power here isnt the absence of fear; its the decision to stop letting fear run the meeting. Lorde flips the usual self-help script. She doesnt promise courage as a personality trait you either have or dont. She frames it as a practice: dare, use, serve. The verb "dare" matters because it admits risk and backlash. For a Black lesbian feminist writing in the teeth of racism, sexism, homophobia, and institutional erasure, being "powerful" was never a neutral aspiration. It was a transgression.

The line "to use my strength in the service of my vision" is doing quiet political work. Strength without direction can look like brute force or performance; vision without strength can get filed under "idealism" and safely ignored. Lorde insists on their marriage. The "service" phrasing also rejects the macho fantasy of power as domination. Her power is accountable to something beyond the ego: a future she can imagine and insist on.

Then comes the dagger: once power is aligned with purpose, fear starts to shrink in relevance. Not vanish. Not get conquered. Just matter less. Thats a radically adult promise, especially for marginalized people trained to treat safety as the highest good. Lorde is writing toward a politics of self-definition where silence is the real danger, where the cost of staying small compounds over time. The subtext is a warning disguised as liberation: if you wait to act until youre unafraid, you will outsource your life to the fears that were planted in you for someone elses convenience.