Quotations From Some Courageous Women

Audre Lorde (1934 - 1972)

"Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me--so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins."

"The love expressed between women is particular and powerful, because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival."

Mary McLane (The Story of Mary MacLane by Herself)

"Are there many things in this cool-hearted world so utterly exquisite as the pure love of one woman for another?"

Rita Mae Brown

"I became a lesbian because of women, because women are beautiful, strong, and compassionate."

"Women who love women are Lesbians. Men, because they can only think of women in sexual terms, define Lesbian as sex between women.�

"No government has the right to tell its citizens when or whom to love. The only queer people are those who don't love anybody."

"Any woman whose I.Q. hovers above her body temperature must be a feminist."

Kate Clinton - comedian, author

"She couldn't say lesbian if her mouth was full of one."

Amanda Bearse

"You can't type what a lesbian is. We're anything and everything. The one thing in common is that we make love to other women. So give up trying to limit us."

"When she lowers her eyes she seems to hold all the beauty in the world between her eyelids; when she raises them I see only myself in her gaze."

"When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks."

Radclyffe Hall (The Well of Loneliness, 1928)

"You're neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you're as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you're unexplained as yet -- you've not got your niche in creation."

Adrienne Rich

"Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty."