Marilyn French Quotes

My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don't matter.

Survival is an art. It requires the dulling of the mind and the senses, and a delicate attunement to waiting, without insisting on precision about just what it is you are waiting for.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water.

I'd discovered you never know yourself until you're tested and that you don't even know you're being tested until afterwards, and that in fact there isn't anyone giving the test except yourself.

Men stumble over pebbles, never over mountains.

In a way it doesn't matter whether you open doors or close them, you still end up in a box.

Control over a woman is the only form of dominance most men possess, for most men are merely subjects of more powerful men.

Habit is a good thing for the human race ... You have to spend so much energy just getting through the day when you have no habits that you don't have any left for productive labor.

But we all die, and all death is violent, the overthrowing of the state of life, so why did that year [1968]seem so terrible? Are King or Kennedy or some peasant folk in a village more important than the starved-out of Biafra, the names on the Detroit homicide list? Maybe I'm playing an intellectual game, marking out one year or two on a calendar as special in horror so I can add that they were also special in significance, and thus compensate for the horror, or even redeem it. Humans are fond of finding ways to be grateful for their suffering, calling falls fortunate and deaths resurrection. It's not a bad idea, I guess: since you're going to have the suffering anyway, you might as well be grateful for it. Sometimes, though, I think if we didn't expect the suffering, we wouldn't have so much of it.

I've known for a long time that hypocrisy is the secret of sanity. You mustn't let them know you know.

Not many men have both good fortune and good sense.

But she continued to wonder what the fish tasted like, so brilliant and vivid pink. Would it taste pink?

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape ... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

S and M is only the expression in the bedroom of an oppressive-submissive relation which can happen also in the kitchen or at the factory, can happen between people of any gender. There is obviously something titillating about these relationships, but it isn't the sexual components that makes them ugly, they're uglier elsewhere. Nothing sexual is depraved. Only cruelty is depraved, and that's another matter.

For men to focus on controlling women's reproduction to solve a society's problems seems nothing short of mad or, at best, superstitious. But men's superstition or insanity has real and dire consequences for the women who are its object. And states, too, home in on women's bodies, perhaps to create the illusion that men are in control of uncontrollable forces. Indeed, almost all governments try to control women's bodies and regulate their appearance in some way.

The real motivation of the campaign to criminalize abortion is to establish the principles that women's bodies belong to the state and that women bear the responsibility for sex.

Men seem unable to feel equal to women: they must be superior or they are inferior.

One advantage to being a despised species is that you have freedom, freedom to be any crazy thing you want. If you listen to a group of housewives talk, you'll hear a lot of nonsense, some of it really crazy. This comes, I think, from being alone so much, and pursuing your own odd train of thought without impediment, which some call discipline. The result is craziness, but also brilliance. Ordinary women come out with the damnedest truth. You ignore them at your own risk. And they are permitted to go on making wild statements without being put in one kind of jail or another (some of them, anyway) because everyone knows they're crazy and powerless too. If a woman is religious or earthy, passive or wildly assertive, loving or hating, she doesn't get much more flak than if she isn't: her choices lie between being castigated as a ball and chain or as a whore.

You think I hate men. I guess I do, although some of my best friends...I don't like this position. I mistrust generalized hatred. I feel like one of those twelfth century monks raving on about how evil women are and how they must cover themselves up completely when they go out lest they lead men into evil thoughts. The assumption that the men are the ones who matter, and that the women exist only in relation to them, is so silent and underrunning that ever we never picked it up until recently. But after all, look at what we read. I read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Freud and Erikson; I read de Montherlant and Joyce and Lawrence and sillier people like Miller and Mailer and Roth and Philip Wylie. I read the Bible and Greek myths and didn't question why all later redactions relegated Gaea-Tellus and Lilith to a footnote and made Saturn the creator of the world. I read or read about, without much question, the Hindus and the Jews, Pythagoras and Aristotle, Seneca, Cato, St.Paul, Luther, Sam Johnson, Rousseau, Swift...well, you understand. For years I didn't take it personally.
So now it is difficult for me to call others bigots when I am one myself. I tell people at once, to warn them, that I suffer from deformation of character. But the truth is I am sick unto death of four thousand years of males telling me how rotten my sex is. Especially it makes me sick when I look around and see such rotten men and such magnificent women, all of whom have a sneaking

For many people, morality means a set of rules governing the disposition on one's genital organs; or a set of injunctions against lying, stealing, or killing except when such acts are sanctioned by church or state.

'I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes,' she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the damned dishes.

Never underestimate the power of helplessness!

Fear and desire for pleasure. Aggressiveness comes out of fear, predominantly, and sexuality predominantly out of the other. But they mix in the middle. Anyway, both of these impulses can destroy order, which comes out of both drives, and which is another human need I haven't yet fit into my scheme. So both have to be controlled. But in fact, despite religious commands to the contrary, aggressiveness has never really been condemned. It's been exalted, from the Bible through Homer and Virgil right down to Humbert Hemingway. Have you ever heard of a John Wayne movie being censored? did you ever see them take war books off the bookstands? They leave the genitals off Barbie and Ken, but they manufacture every kind of war toy. Because sex is more threatening to us than aggression. There have been strict rules about sex since the beginning of written rules, and even before, if we can believe myth. I think that's because it's in sex that men feel most vulnerable. In war they can hype themselves up, or they have a weapon. Sex means being literally naked and exposing your feelings. And that's more terrifying to most men than the risk of dying while fighting a bear or a soldier. Look at the rules! You can have sex if you're married, and you have to marry a person of the opposite gender, the same color and religion, an age close to your own, of the right social and economic background, even the right height, for God's sake, or else everybody gets up in arms, they disinherit you or threa

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

I have opened all the doors in my head.
I have opened all the pores in my body.
But only the tide rolls in.

They leave the genitals off Barbie and Ken, but they manufacture every kind of war toy. Because sex is more threatening to us than aggression. There have been strict rules about sex since the beginning of written rules, and even before, if we can believe myth. I think that's because it's in sex that men feel most vulnerable. In war they can hype themselves up, or they have a weapon. Sex means being literally naked and exposing your feelings. And that's more terrifying to most men than the risk of dying while fighting a bear or a soldier.

That's sheer luck too: luck of the draw of birth: century, continent, nation, section, sex, color, socioeconomic sector.

You can't equate passive dependent power with assertive power because the dependent kind isn't fun, it doesn't give you a kick, it just allows you to survive.

Men: they are what they are and women have to accept that and try to shift around them. Especially men with power. Money. The upper hand. The raised hand. Momma`s philosophy. Here`s to you, Momma.
She raised the empty cup.
What`s the use of fighting them. What`s the use. To struggle, to live in anger takes everything out of you, drains you, makes people hate you and what`s the use? You get nothing you want, all you get is tired.

There's power to: and everyone should have that, but everyone doesn't. Power to play Bach, or tennis, or boccie if you like. And there's power over; and no one should have that, but people do.

Marriage accustomed one to the good things, so one came to take them for granted, but it magnified the bad things, so they came to feel as painful as a grain in one's eye. An open window, a forgotten quart of milk, a TV set left blaring, socks on the bathroom floor could become occasions for incredible rage.

Women are afraid in a world in which almost half the population bears the guise of the predator, in which no factor - age, dress, or color - distinguishes a man who will harm a woman from one who will not.

Oh, God, why don't I remember that a little chaos is good for the soul?

I believe that all human beings are equal. I believe that no one has the right to authority over anyone else.

There was no justice, there was only life. And life she had.

But communes are a good idea. People criticize communes because they don't last, but why in hell, will you tell me, should they last? Why does an order have to become a permanent order? Maybe we should live one way for some years, then try another.

When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress?

In the beginning was the Mother, the Word began a new era, one we have come to call Patriarchy.

Later, she would remember these years, and realize with astonishment that she had, by fifteen, decided on most of the assumptions she would carry for the rest of her life: that people were essentially not evil, that perfection was death, that life was better than order and a little chaos good for the soul. Most important, this life was all. Unfortunately, she forgot these things, and had to remember them the hard way.

It does seem true that a young woman may sometimes behave in a way that can be called titillating, and that men take such behavior as being directed entirely at them. [...]
I've often seen blushing young men with shining eyes behave in the same way, but no one says of them that they want to be raped. If, after taking a few steps forward, they then decide to retreat, no one accuses them of being cunt teasers. In fact, the disappointed woman probably thinks it's all her fault.

Male territorial insanity yields only to another male. What a difference the possession of a penis makes!

The breakdown of the neighborhoods also meant the end of what was essentially an extended family....With the breakdown of the extended family, too much pressure was put on the single family. Mom had no one to stay with Granny, who couldn't be depended on to set the house on fire while Mom was off grocery shopping. The people in the neighborhood weren't there to keep an idle eye out for the fourteen-year-old kid who was the local idiot, and treated with affection as well as tormented....So we came up with the idea of putting everybody in separate places. We lock them up in prisons, mental hospitals, geriatric housing projects, old-age homes, nursery schools, cheap suburbs that keep women and the kids of f the streets, expensive suburbs where everybody has their own yard and a front lawn that is tended by a gardener so all the front lawns look alike and nobody uses them anyway....the faster we lock them up, the higher up goes the crime rate, the suicide rate, the rate of mental breakdown. The way it's going, there'll be more of them than us pretty soon. Then you'll have to start asking questions about the percentage of the population that's not locked up, those that claim that the other fifty-five per cent is crazy, criminal, or senile.
WE have to find some other way....So I started imagining....Suppose we built houses in a circle, or a square, or whatever, connected houses of varying sizes, but beautiful, simple. And outside, behind the houses, all the space usually given

The words of Pyotr Stephanovich come into my mind: You must love God because He is the only one you can love for Eternity.
That sounds very profound to me, and tears come into my eyes whenever I say it. I never heard anyone else say it. But I don't believe in God and if I did I couldn't love Him/Her/It. I couldn't love anyone I thought had created this world.

Even disasters
there are always disasters when you travel
can be turned into adventures.

She drowned in words that could not teach her how to swim.

Some people use bullfights, some the Mass, some art in order to ritualize or transform death into life or at least meaning. But my terror is that life itself is a ritual transforming everything into death.

Men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.

When a baby first looks at you ... when it laughs that deep, unselfconscious gurgle; or when it cries and you pick it up and it clings sobbing to you ... then you are-happy is not the precise word-filled.

My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of western civilization, to make it a feminist world.

Six men control almost all the media in the United States--book publishing, magazines, television, movie studios, newspapers, and radio. They are not friendly toward feminism, which has almost disappeared from the surface of our society. You will almost never see a feminist column on an op-ed page, a feminist article in a magazine, or newspaper, actual (not satirized) feminist ideas on television or in the movies. Only magazines & radio controlled by feminists--and these are few and not well-funded--offer information on the feminist perspective.

This might be understandable if feminism were a wild-eyed manic philosophy. But it is a belief, a politics, based on one simple fact: women are human beings who matter as much as men. That is all that feminism claims. As human beings, women have the right to control their own bodies, to walk freely in the world, to train their minds and bodies, and to love and hate at will. Only those who wish to continue to coerce women into a servant/slave class for men cannot accept this principle.

There's no justice, there's only love.

What is a man, anyway? Everything I see around me in popular culture tells me a man is he who screws and kills. But everything I see around me in life tells me a man is he who makes money.

When a man loses superiority, he loses potency. That's what all this talk about castrating women is about. Castrating women are those who refuse to pretend men are better than they are and better than women are. The simple truth - that men are only equal - can undermine a culture more devastatingly than any bomb. Subversion is telling the truth.