Happy Birthday to the late Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison, two legendary Black women who reshaped our understanding of gender and race through their writing and activism. Audre Lorde’s body of work includes Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) and The Cancer Journals (1980), and Toni Morrison’s includes Song of Solomon (1977), The Bluest Eye (1970), and Beloved (1987) which won her a Pulitzer Prize in 1988.  In honor of Lorde and Morrison’s legacies, here are a few of our favorite quotes from these influential trailblazers.

Audre Lorde

• “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
• “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
• “There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our own living.”
• “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
• “You cannot, you cannot use someone else’s fire. You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it.”

Toni Morrison

• “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
• “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
• “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.”
• “You your best thing.”
• “Make a difference about something other than yourselves.”