Eve Ensler Quotes

If you look at capitalism and patriarchy, they're both such hierarchical, competitive, oneupmanship systems. They've trained us all [to think] that power means having all the goods or having the most money or having the most attention or having the most fame. That's not the power that interests me. Actually, the deconstruction of that power is what interests me.

I think theatre to some extent is always about telling stories, isn't it, and I think what I've learned is that freedom comes when you tell your story; freedom comes when you tell the truth.

What does your vagina smell like?' ANSWER: 'My husband's face.

Unless men are active allies, we'll never end violence against women and girls.

I think the world is always improving and always not improving. I think that both are simultaneously happening all the time.

I think of the security of cages. How violence, cruelty, oppression, become a kind of home, a familiar pattern, a cage, in which we know how to operate and define ourselves ...

Why aren't we looking at the causes of breast cancer? Why aren't we spending our energy on looking at what we're doing to the earth? On the pollutants we're putting into the earth? And the pesticides we're putting into the earth? What we're releasing into the air? Instead, we just cut off more organs! That's where metaphor comes into it - not even metaphor as much as reality.

Saying the word I was not supposed to say is the thing that gave me a voice in the world.

We get off track. Capitalism takes us off track. You get off the "real" and get on the "wheel." The "wheel" becomes the winning and losing, the succeeding and failing, the "I will achieve." All that stuff becomes so preoccupying, particularly if you're born with low self-esteem, or no sense of yourself, or even if you're just born in the consumer culture. It's very powerful.

I think that anytime you get clear about what your mission is or what your focus wants to be, things start to come together in your life.

About violence, what it feels like to be nothing to someone else. What it feels like to be a consequence of someone else's dissociated rage, disconnected fury.

Slowly, it dawned on me that nothing was more important than stopping violence toward women - that the desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honor and protect life

What happens when someone throws you against a wall or tells you you're a jackass or puts you down or calls you bad names? It goes into your body. We hold it in our body. If we don't have a way to let that go and release that, it becomes sickness eventually.

Danger lurks when people are dissociated and detached from their own story or feelings.

Stop trying to fix your body. It was never broken.

Dance is holy, sexual, and it's a way of being very powerful and a little dangerous without being violent.

Looking at it, I started crying. Maybe it was knowing that I had to give up the fantasy, the enormous life consuming fantasy , that someone or something was going to do this for me – the fantasy that someone was coming to lead my life, to choose direction, to give me orgasms.

It's a weird thing about the truth: It protects you. What really makes you vulnerable is when you're lying because you're going to get caught. When you tell the truth, there's a strange relief that comes.

In the United States, the last recorded clitoridectomy for curing masturbation was performed in 1948
on a five year old girl.

Do I think it's great that we have a celebrity system where some people matter and some people don't? No. But do I think we'll always create icons and legends? Yeah, I probably do.

Terence McKenna says, "The culture is not your friend." I am not sure we can change this culture. But I think we can rise above it and create a new world. That's why I so deeply believe in alternative spaces. That's why I believe in the power of art and activism.

I think for me, happiness is crucial, but I think we think that happiness comes from amassing goods and getting things and being loved and being successful, when in fact my experience of happiness comes when you give everything away, when you serve people, when you're watching something you do make somebody happy - that's when happiness happens.

I am worried about this word, this notion - security. I see this word, hear this word, feel this word everywhere. Security check. Security watch. Security clearance. Why has all this focus on security made me feel so much more insecure? ... Why are we suddenly a nation and a people who strive for security above all else?

I think to be honest, that being is inside. I meet that being in so many people that I meet everywhere in the world and when I do meet that being, in other people, what I want to ask is "How do we keep opening ourselves so that we can become as vulnerable and as willing to live in the deepest complexity and ambiguity and truth that we can?"

Theater has an incredible capacity to move people to social change, to address issues, to inspire social revolution.

Three of the ten principles governing the City of Joy are (a) tell the truth, (b) stop waiting to be rescued, and (c) give away what you want the most.

If you just look at the fact that a woman was central in twittering the Cairo revolution, and women were central to the Tunisian uprising. Women are at the center of everything right now and moving everything forward. And I do think in the next year or two, we are going to see such a woman spring, such a rising.

I had always thought of my vagina as an anatomical vacuum randomly sucking up particles and objects from the surrounding environment.

I bet you're worried. I was worried. I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don't think about them.

It is hard to determine what is most disturbing about this book - the devious and immoral tactics used by leaders and recruiters to get women to join the military, the terrible poverty and personal violence women were escaping that lead them to be vulnerable to such manipulation, the raping and harassing of women soldiers by their superiors and comrades once they got to Iraq, or the untreated homelessness, illnesses and madness that have haunted women since they came home. The Lonely Soldier is an important book, a crucial accounting of the shameful war on women who gave their bodies, lives and souls for their country.

When we give in the world what we want the most, we heal the broken part inside each of us.

I think all my work's been about how do women get back into our bodies; how do men get back. We're all disassociated.

I think violence against women in America has become ordinary - it's been made absolutely acceptable.

I'm a feminist; I grew up with feminism, but I also think there's a way in which we need to shake things up so that we can push it further and in other directions.

I think when people begin to tell their stories, everything changes, because not only are you legitimised in the telling of your story and are you found, literally, like you matter, you exist in the telling of your story, but when you hear your story be told, you suddenly exist in community and with others.

I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense. (xxvi)

I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas
a community, a culture of vaginas. There's so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them
like the Bermunda Triangle.

It seems to me there's this tyranny that's not accidental or incidental, to make women feel compelled to look like somebody they're not. I think the effort is being made to get us to turn our time and attention to this instead of important political issues.

Why are women immobile? Because so many feel like they're waiting for someone to say, 'You're good, you're pretty, I give you permission.'

Everything you deny is actually killing you on some level. You see something, you feel something wrong with your body, you pretend it's not happening, it goes on, it grows, it gets worse.

Maybe being good isn't about getting rid of anything. Maybe being good has to do with living in the mess in the frailty in the failures in the flaws. Maybe what I tried to get rid of is the goodest part of me. Think Passion. Think Age. Think Round. Maybe good is about developing the capacity to live fully inside everything. Our body is our country, the only city, the only village, the only every we will ever know.

I have always been obsessed with naming things. If I could name them, I could know them. If I could name them, I could tame them. They could be my friends.

Dance has a transformative effect on bodily trauma.

I think we just have to look at all the ways in which we are violating the Earth, each other, economic violence, racial violence, environmental violence - where we are dominating and not cooperating .

If I had a dream it would be to think, What would it be like for everybody to have the kind of health care I had? What would that feel like? How would that be, to live in that world? Because I'll tell you, to be really, really sick, and to not have money. That is terrifying. And in my opinion, a travesty.

I feel sometimes with boys that the tyranny of patriarchy has had a much more devastating blow on boys than it has on anyone. Because they have literally been forced to disassociate from their hearts.

There were momentary visitations. I was a visitor, not an inhabitant. I think I say that at the beginning of the book: "I have made visits to the earth in my body, but it's always been as a visitor."

I believe in fierce love, pushing the edge, calling the robbers, the corporates, the elites, the pillagers and insanely wealthy to task, going whatever distance we need to go now to protect our earth and each other.

When I wrote 'The Good Body,' I turned 40 and suddenly had this stomach. It seemed like the end of the world. Because I didn't value my body. I was constantly judging it, but I also didn't live in it.

Cancer was the most terrifying, arduous, painful thing, but it was also a profound gift in the sense that I was holding so much in my body for so many years that was dark and terrifying which was preventing my coming back into myself.

I think to be cut off from your heart is the greatest tyranny in the world.

One of the most radical things women can do is to love their body.

It became a kind of passion. Discovering the key, unlocking the vagina's mouth, unlocking this voice, this wild song.

Women secretly love to talk about their vaginas. They get very excited, mainly because no one has ever asked them before.

I think the greatest illusion we have is that denial protects us. It's actually the biggest distortion and lie. In fact, staying asleep is what's killing us.

I honestly never understood how violence against women became a women's issue. 95 percent of the violence men are doing to women.

I think many of us get separated from the mothership - our body - early on. I think the mothership is also the Earth, and life itself. Trauma separates us from that and dissociates us from our hearts.

With the Gulf spill, I absolutely merged in the time when I had that infection. I couldn't get out of the Gulf spill. There were so many similarities: the drains and the siphoning and the tubes. And also in the way the earth was hurt, the ocean was bleeding. Remember the video cams of the oil gushing? I couldn't stop watching that.

To love women, to love our vaginas, to know them and touch them and be familiar with who we are and what we need. To satisfy ourselves, to teach our lovers to satisfy us, to be present in our vaginas, to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humor, to make them visible so they cannot be ravaged in the dark without great consequence, so that our center, our point, our motor, our dream, is no longer detached, mutilated, numb, broken, invisible, or ashamed.

The love is all around us. I made a life of love.

You have visits, then you have disappearances. You enter, then you exit. You come, you go. It would be so great if you could just get to human enlightenment on a linear path.

Prostration: placing the body in reverence, to submit, to surrender. In many faiths it is used to relinquish the ego. In Tibetan tantric Buddhism they do one hundred thousand prostrations to overcome pride. In Islam, prostration has been known to overcome many diseases.

I started thinking about how it's actually hard to love Barbie the way she is now. She is very tough, so much plastic. She's not cuddly at all. She can't even put her arms around you. You have to do things for her: worship her, dress her, buy her things. She wants everything. She is very greedy and needy. That's how they get you to spend more money.

The verb that's been enforced on girls is to please. Girls are trained to please ... I want us all to change the verb. I want the verb to be educate, or activate, or engage, or confront, or defy, or create.

I would rate the fact that I get to be alive a big beautiful 10. Satisfaction with myself - work in progress.

People didn't feel so much shame around it and that they didn't feel so much humiliation around it. And the other thing that people have given me a lot of feedback about - something I'm very excited about - is all the stuff around chemo as an "empathetic warrior."

Women are the primary resource of the planet. They give birth, we come from them. They are mothers, they are visionaries, they are the future. If we can figure out how to make women feel safe and honor women, it would be parallel or equal to honoring life itself.

I was always reaching for love, but it turns out love doesn't involve reaching. I was always dreaming of the big love, the ultimate love, the love that would sweep me off my feet or 'break open the hard shell of my lesser self' (Daisaku Ikeda). The love that would bring on my surrender. The love that would inspire me to give everything. As I lay there, it occurred to me that while I had been dreaming of this big love, this ultimate love, I had, without realizing it, been giving and receiving love for most of my life. As with the trees that were right in front of me, I had been unable to value what sustained me, fed me, and gave me pleasure. And as with the trees, I was so busy waiting for and imagining and reaching and dreaming and preparing for this huge big love that I had totally missed the beauty and perfection of the soft-boiled eggs and Bolivian quinoa.

An activist is someone who cannot help but fight for something. That person is not usually motivated by a need for power or money or fame, but in fact is driven slightly mad by some injustice, some cruelty, some unfairness, so much so that he or she is compelled by some internal moral engine to act to make it better.

I really want to help stop violence toward women.

I think we need to teach pleasure. What beautiful touch means. What reciprocity means. What being connected and what intimacy means. Boys get out there at a young age and the performance posturing is so great and ends up being hard and aggressive.

What happened with cancer was that I just became a body. There was nothing else but body for a month. I was chemo'd and operated on and cut and poked. At first it was really horrifying and scary, and then it was just,Wow. You're in your body. This is body!

I think the human species is very suicidal.

Slavery is back
but never went away

I really do think how we frame things determines so much of our experience, and I've been talking to a lot of oncologists, like, why don't we call them transformation suites and give people transformation juice and have guides that support people when they're going through chemo so you could actually burn away what needs to be burned away, as opposed to this dread, terror, horror, which is a very different experience.

It [the memoir "In The Body of the World"] wrote me. I joke about it, but this book was so unusual. It just started to come out. I really feel like it came straight from my body. I think it was both an expression of what I had gone through, but also it just felt like everything had come together in my body and it needed to tell that story.

Wouldn't it be incredible if everyone could be purged, somehow, of the projected not-them badness that they internalized and perhaps have acted out because their souls have been so damaged? Wouldn't it be incredible if everyone could find the joy that comes with committing to our own goodness? Perhaps we would stop dividing ourselves into malignancies of various forms.

I can only describe it as: the whole experience was imprinted on my body. And when I started to write it, it just came from such a very, In The Body of the Worldvery physical ... it just came from my body. I don't know how to explain it better than that. I guess my head was transmitting it. It was a very, very physical experience writing this book.

Stop shoving things up me. Stop shoving and stop cleaning it up. My vagina doesn't need to be cleaned up. It smells good already. Not like rose petals. Don't try to decorate.

Good is towing the line, being behaved, being quiet, being passive, fitting in, being liked, and great is being messy, having a belly, speaking your mind, standing up for what you believe in, fighting for another paradigm, not letting people talk you out of what you know to be true.

What if, instead of being afraid of even talking about death, we saw our lives in some ways as preparation for it.
What if we were taught to ponder it and reflect on it and talk about it and enter it and rehearse it and try it on?What if, rather than being cast out and defined by some terminal category, you were identified as someone in the middle of a transformation that could deepen your soul, open your heart, and all the while-even if and particularly when you were dying-you would be supported by and be part of a community?

Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no when you don't want to do something. Say yes if your instincts are strong, even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you're doing here. Believe in kissing.

I think so much of my early life, even though I grew up White and middle class, I was completely shattered by the horrifically violent atmosphere I grew up in. I am a consequence of violence. That opened a door to many realities that I would not have experienced had I not survived what I did.

You have to give to the world the thing that you want the most, in order to fix the broken parts inside you.

Stop fixing your bodies and start fixing the world!

For me, so much of my life has been this attempt to find my way back into my body. I tried various forms, from promiscuity, to eating disorders, to performance art. And I think it wasn't until I got cancer, where I was suddenly being pricked and ported and chemoed and operated on, that I suddenly just became body. I was just a body. And it was in that, in that finally landing in myself that I really discovered the world in my body.

The devastation of neoliberalism is so multi-fold, whether it's violence against women or desperate economic inequality or the destruction of the planet.

The African specialist Nahid Toubia puts it plain [when speaking of female genital mutilation]: In a man it would range from amoutation of most of the penis, to removal of all the penis, its roots of soft tissue and part of the scrotal skin.

What I would say to young women is: Pay attention to the real. Pay attention to what you're really thirsting for. What do you really want? And I think that's much harder to decipher in a culture that has no interest in it. What interests me is, are we going to wake in time? Are human beings going to wake up to ourselves, to the incredible poverty that's on this planet, to what we're doing to the earth, to what we're doing to women, to what we're doing to boys? That's what's important.

The signs accumulated. But I did not respond. I would not wake up. We will not wake up. This terrifying sleep of denial. Is it an underlying belief that we as a human species are not worth it? Do we secretly feel we have lost our right to be here in all our selfishness and stupidity, our cruelty and greed?

V-day is a movement: an organized effort to finally end violence against women.
V-Day is a vision: we see a civilization where women live in freedom and safety.
V-Day is a spirit: affirming that life should be live creating and thriving rather than surviving or recovering from terrible atrocities.
V-Day is a catalyst: by raising wide public awareness of the issue, it will reinvigorates efforts already under way and commence new initiatives in publicity, education, and law.
V-Day is a vital ongoing process: we proclaim Valentine's Day as V'day until the violence against women stops, and the it will become Victory Day.

Why don't we bring everyone up to be caring and compassionate, to believe that we are connected with everyone and everything around us?

I wake up every day and I think, 'I'm breathing! It's a good day.'

I think it was a realization of this cancer, an understanding of the broader implications of what cancer is. The greed, the ravaging of lands and seas for profit, the taking of things that don't belong to us; what we've done to the environment in this fast-paced, careless hunger. I think all of that was happening in my body.

Before cancer, I was obviously disconnected. I had a tumor the size of a mango inside me and didn't do anything about it. It wasn't like I didn't know something was wrong.

Political change and academic change and intellectual change are obviously crucial, but they don't necessarily change society. They can change a particular class and give everybody in that class great arguments, but that doesn't necessarily translate into the body of the culture.

What I'm really interested in is freedom.

The only point of having power it seems to me is to empower others. The only point of leadership is to inspire.

Trauma dissociates us from the parts of our body that are wounded, so we have to leave our whole body. It's a journey you take your whole life, that coming back in, re-landing in your body, in your self, on the Earth. I think one of the reasons it's been so easy, in a way, for us to violate both women and the Earth is this profound dissociation that exists in everyone.

It is almost a guarantee that in the pursuit of security you will become more insecure. Inherent in the quest for security is its undoing.