Using People Like Kleenex (Simile)
In "Notes on the Erotic," Lorde uses the simile of a Kleenex to distinguish between sharing emotions with another person and using that person's feelings for one's own personal gratification. To use a person for their emotions, Lorde says, is akin to using them as a Kleenex—a disposable, cheap object. To use a person as if they are an object, Lorde will later argue, is essentially abuse. To use them as if they are a mass-produced and uninteresting item like a Kleenex, then, is both abusive and thoughtless.
Treating Black Women as Decorations (Metaphor)
When critiquing Mary Daly's use of Black women's stories and quotations in "An Open Letter to Mary Daly," Lorde accuses her of thinking "that nonwhite women and our herstories are noteworthy only as decorations..." Lorde consistently critiques worldviews that imagine Blackness or femininity as superfluous adornments rather than fundamental necessities. With this metaphor, she argues that Daly has subscribed to just such a worldview. Moreover, since, according to this metaphor, Daly is using these "herstories" to decorate her own words and ideas, Lorde implies that she is both dismissing Black women and benefitting from their struggles in a hypocritical fashion.
Learning Grammar Like Learning to Drive (Simile)
In Adrienne Rich's interview of Lorde, Lorde describes the epiphany she had while teaching grammar to English students. She recalls realizing that grammatical rules are far from arbitrary, and actually provide meaning and structure to language. "It's like driving a car," she explains, "once we know it we can choose to discard it or use it, but you can't know if it has useful or destructive power until you have a handle on it." With this simile, Lorde suggests that grammar and other strictures around language can be both useful and dangerous—just like driving—but that know-how is essential to deciding whether or not the dangerousness of the situation outweighs its usefulness. Just as a person must learn to drive a car before reasonably deciding whether doing so is too dangerous and frightening to be justified, a person must learn grammatical rules before deciding whether those rules are helpful guidelines or oppressive restrictions.
Symphony of Anger (Metaphor)
In "Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger," Lorde writes that "Women of Color in america have grown up within a symphony of anger." This anger is a justified but painful response to constant rejection, disgust, and dismissal. Lorde goes on to call attention to her own choice of metaphor, writing that she chose the word "symphony" rather than "cacophony" intentionally: because of the sheer amount of anger these women feel, Lorde says, they have no choice but to arrange it into some kind of comprehensible, sensible pattern, just as an orchestra conductor rearranges overwhelming noise into a comprehensible pattern.
Strasbourg Goose (Simile)
In "Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger," Lorde writes "How do I free myself from this poison I was force-fed like a Strasburg goose?"She is referencing the process of force-feeding geese in order to fatten them so that their livers can be used to make foie gras, an expensive delicacy. This simile implies not only that Black women are unwilling recipients of anger and hatred, which they then internalize, but also that this constant assault works to the benefit of a small and privileged group of oppressors. Just as the misery of a Strasbourg goose is inflicted so that someone else can enjoy, Lorde implies, the misery of women of color benefits the enjoyment of a white consumer culture.
