Monique Wittig Quotes

They say that there is no reality before it has been given shape by words rules regulations. They say that in what concerns them everything has to be remade starting from basic principles. They say that in the first place the vocabulary of every language is to be examined, modified, turned upside down, that every word must be screened.

I am with fire between my teeth and still nothing but my blank page.

Not only do we naturalize history, but also consequently we naturalize the social phenomena which express our oppression, making change impossible

The bearers of fables are very welcome.

For there is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary.

One is a writer, or one is not.

The class struggle is precisely that which resolves the contradictions between two opposed classes by abolishing them at the same time that it constitutes and reveals them as classes.

I refuse to pronounce the names of possession and nonpossession.

Frankly, [the definition of woman] is a problem that the lesbians do not have because of a change of perspective. 'Woman' has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual, economic systems. Lesbians are not women.

Despite all the evils they wished to crush me with/
I remain as steady as the three-legged cauldron.

One only has to read interviews with outstanding women to hear them apologizing

The basic agreement between human beings, indeed what makes them human and makes them social, is language.

A materialist feminist approach to women's oppression destroys the idea that women are a 'natural group' ... What the analysis accomplishes on the level of ideas, practice makes actual at the level of facts: by its very existence, lesbian society destroys the artificial (social) fact constituting women as a 'natural group.' A lesbian society pragmatically reveals that the division from men of which women have been the object is a political one ...

It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary. The contrary would be to say that sex creates oppression, or to say that the cause (origin) of oppression is to be found in sex itself, in a natural division of the sexes preexisting (or outside of) society.

They say, hell, let the earth become a vast hell destroying killing and setting fire to the buildings of men, to theatres, national assemblies, to museums, libraries, prisons, psychiatric hospitals, old and new, from which they free the slaves.

They say that oppression engenders hate. They are heard on all sides crying hate hate.

I feel a near passion for intelligence at grips with itself and not letting go.