Audre Lorde — Quote from Sister Outsider

“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”

Sister Outsider (1984)

Concepts: authenticity, oppression, agency

Resonant Quotes

“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” — Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks Both explore the tension between cultural assimilation and authentic selfhood, with Fanon revealing how language forc...
“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” — Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks Fanon's embodied questioning and Lorde's self-definition represent parallel acts of resistance against systems that w...
“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex Lorde's refusal to let others define her and Beauvoir's insight that identity is constructed both insist on self-defi...
“The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness. It is the expre...” — Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom Lorde's assertion about self-definition directly counters the weakness Fromm identifies—her fierce commitment to auth...
“How can man know himself? He is a thing dark and veiled. The true way that le...” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator Both Lorde's self-definition against external impositions and Nietzsche's call to obey one's own law assert that auth...
“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations Lorde's self-definition against imposed identities demonstrates Sartre's freedom principle by actively reshaping the ...
“The oppressor would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the...” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex Lorde's assertion about self-definition represents the precise antidote to de Beauvoir's problem of complicity, showi...
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” — Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own Woolf's material independence creates the necessary space for Lorde's self-definition, as economic and physical auton...