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Who really said it

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation

Written by Audre Lorde 1934–1992 · American poet, essayist & civil rights activist
Verified wording — routinely truncated In copyright

Lorde wrote this in A Burst of Light (Firebrand Books, 1988), in the book’s epilogue, written as she lived with breast cancer that had spread to her liver. The words are hers verbatim — but the sentence does not stop where the internet stops it. In full: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Wikiquote carries the line with a full citation to p. 125, in the journal “A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer.”

Last verified 15 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Verified quote & credit

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation” Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light (1988), p. 125. The full sentence: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by the Estate of Audre Lorde and her publishers; the collection is currently published by Dover Publications). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Audre Lorde — American poet, essayist & civil rights activist. Theme: "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where the line really comes from

Work
A Burst of Light: Essays
Section
“A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer” (per Wikiquote’s citation); Sara Ahmed places the line in the book’s epilogue
Published
1988 (Firebrand Books, Ithaca, N.Y.), p. 125
Full sentence
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Overextending myself is not stretching myself. … Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

The ellipsis marks intervening lines of Lorde’s journal, which remain in copyright and are not reproduced here in full. The popular quote stops at “self-preservation” — a little over halfway through the sentence — and drops the clause that names it as warfare.

Scanned first edition
Borrow the 1988 Firebrand Books edition at the Internet Archive
Internet Archive: A Burst of Light, first edition scan

How we verified this

  • Wikiquote’s Audre Lorde page carries the line with a full citation — the page has no Misattributed or Disputed section — giving the full sentence and citing A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer (1988), p. 125, Firebrand Books, ISBN 0932379400.
  • Sara Ahmed opens “Selfcare as Warfare” (2014) with the full sentence, attributes it to the epilogue of A Burst of Light, and notes Lorde wrote it while learning she had liver cancer.
  • The Internet Archive and Open Library catalog records both confirm the edition Wikiquote cites: Firebrand Books, Ithaca, N.Y., 1988, ISBNs 0932379397 / 0932379400, containing the journal “A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer.” The scan is borrow-only, so the page image was not consulted directly.
  • Refinery29 quotes the fuller passage — including “Overextending myself is not stretching myself” — from the same 1988 collection, and documents how the line has been stripped of its political meaning.
In copyright

The line first appeared in A Burst of Light: Essays (Firebrand Books, 1988). As a work first published in 1988 by an identifiable author and publisher, it is in copyright in the United States; rights rest with Audre Lorde’s estate and her publishers. The collection was reissued as A Burst of Light and Other Essays by Dover Publications in 2017 — the year per the Open Library edition record (Ixia Press, Dover’s imprint; ISBN 9780486818993), since the Dover store page itself gives no date. The sentence is quoted here briefly for identification and commentary.

Fact-check

Right author, half a sentence

This one is not a stolen quote — the attribution is correct and the words are Lorde’s exactly. What goes wrong is where the sentence ends. The version in circulation is the front half of a longer thought, and the missing half is the part that carries the politics.

Audre Lorde Truncated

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation” is verbatim Lorde — but her sentence continues, “and that is an act of political warfare.” Wikiquote’s sourced entry gives the whole sentence; Sara Ahmed quotes it in full and stresses that Lorde meant survival under systemic oppression, not the individualism the short form now serves.

Audre Lorde Misquoted

A second variant swaps Lorde’s “Caring for myself” for the branded term “self-care” — yielding “Self-care is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation.” PassItOn displays exactly this form, credited to Lorde with no book, no page and no political clause. Lorde did not use the word “self-care” in this sentence.

Lorde’s actual sentence, in A Burst of Light (Firebrand Books, 1988), p. 125: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Per Wikiquote’s fully cited entry.

Context

The half that gets cut

Lorde wrote this line in the late 1980s, in a journal she kept as her breast cancer spread to her liver. It is not advice about rest; it is a note-to-self about triage, written by a woman calculating how much of herself she could spend on the world before there was nothing left. The lines just before it are blunt and clipped — “Overextending myself is not stretching myself” — the sound of someone learning a limit the hard way.

That is why the missing clause matters. Lorde did not write that caring for herself was self-preservation and leave it there; she wrote that self-preservation was an act of political warfare — a claim that a Black lesbian woman staying alive under systems built to grind her down is itself a hostile act. Cut the sentence at “self-preservation” and it becomes permission to take a bath. Sara Ahmed calls the line “much loved, much cited” while arguing that Lorde meant survival under oppression, not the wellness-industry individualism it now gets used to sell.

The half that gets cut is the half that made it political.

Why the truncation caught on

The short form is simply more sellable. “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation” reads as a tidy, universal permission slip — it fits a mug, a mat, a caption. The full sentence names a fight, and a fight needs an opponent, which is exactly the part a wellness brand cannot print.

A Refinery29 essay quotes the fuller passage and argues that the term self-care “was insidiously co-opted by white people and stripped of its BLACK radical meaning.” With Lorde’s sentence, that stripping happens at the level of punctuation — one dropped clause at a time.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Character Resilience

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Wikiquote — Audre Lordeen.wikiquote.org

Carries the full sentence with a full citation: A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer (1988), p. 125, Firebrand Books.
Internet Archive — A Burst of Light: Essays (1988)archive.org

Scan of the first edition: Firebrand Books, Ithaca, N.Y., 1988, 142 pages. Borrowable.
Sara Ahmed — “Selfcare as Warfare”feministkilljoys.com

Quotes the full sentence, places it in the epilogue of A Burst of Light, and argues against its neoliberal co-optation.
Refinery29 — Reclaiming Audre Lorde’s Radical Self-Carewww.refinery29.com

Quotes the fuller passage including “Overextending myself is not stretching myself” and traces the wellness-industry co-optation.
Open Library — A Burst of Light catalog recordopenlibrary.org

Bibliographic record: Firebrand Books, 1988, ISBNs 0932379397 / 0932379400; lists the “Living with Cancer” journal contents.
Audre Lorde — Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

Biography: born Feb 18, 1934, died Nov 17, 1992; breast cancer diagnosed 1978, liver metastasis six years later; NY State Poet Laureate 1991–92.

The author

Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde

1934–1992 · American poet, essayist & civil rights activist

Audre Lorde was an American writer, professor, poet and civil rights activist whose work refused to separate her identities as a Black woman, a lesbian, a mother and a feminist. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978; six years later she learned it had metastasized to her liver, and A Burst of Light collects the journal entries she kept while living with it. From 1991 until her death in 1992 she served as New York State Poet Laureate.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: Essays (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand Books, 1988), 125. Page reference and the journal "A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer" per Wikiquote's fully cited entry; the epilogue placement per Sara Ahmed, "Selfcare as Warfare," feministkilljoys, Aug. 25, 2014, which places the line in the epilogue of the book without specifying where in it the line falls.

MLA (9th ed.)

Lorde, Audre. A Burst of Light: Essays. Firebrand Books, 1988, p. 125.

APA (7th ed.)

Lorde, A. (1988). A burst of light: Essays (p. 125). Firebrand Books.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation’?” Last verified 15 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/caring-for-myself-is-not-self-indulgence-it-is-self

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