Ensler Eve Quotes

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

My relationship to the desecration of the earth was very theoretical and intellectual until I got sick. I could never watch anything about polar bears dying or the death of bees. There were certain things I knew I couldn't go near because they were too devastating. But I don't think until I got cancer did I get it in my body, what was happening to the earth. I finally went: "Oh! Earth! Organism!" ~ Eve Ensler

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

The heart is capable of sacrifice. So is the vagina. The heart is able to forgive and repair. It can change it's shape to let us in. It can expand to let us out. So can the vagina. It can ache for us and stretch for us, die for us and bleed and bleed us into this difficult, wondrous world. So can the vagina. I was there in the room. I remeber. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

I try not to think about what people think of me. You can't, because then you get hung up in all the people who love you, and you've also got all the people who hate you, because of what you're doing. ~ Eve Ensler

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

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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) ~ Eve Ensler

Finding violence against women means opening to the great power of women, the mystery of women, the heart of women, the wild unending sexuality and creativity of women – and not being afraid. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

My commitment originated in my own story and my own relationship to violence. ~ Eve Ensler

What I believe is that we have this extraordinary spirit inside ourselves, which for me is our Buddha nature. I believe we are in the process of opening and getting closer and closer to our Buddha nature and stripping away all that is covering it. I don't think I'm going to end up meeting this one being up there or out there. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

The clitoris is pure in purpose. It is the only organ in the body designed purely for pleasure. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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

Vagina Warriors are done being victims. They know no one is coming to rescue them. They would not want to be rescued. They have experienced their rage, depression, desire for revenge, and they have transformed them through grieving and service. They have confronted the depth of their darkness. They live in their bodies. They are community makers. They bring everyone in. They have a keen ability to live with ambiguity. They can hold two opposite thoughts at the same time. ~ Eve Ensler

Geography does not define you - love does. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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

Cancer essentially lives in us and becomes activated at some point, and then cells begin to psychotically divide. Initially, the cancer cell looks like other cells and the body invites it in. ~ Eve Ensler

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." ~ Eve Ensler

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

I really want to help stop violence toward women. ~ Eve Ensler

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! ~ Eve Ensler

My vagina's angry. It is. It's pissed off. My vagina's furious and it needs to talk. It needs to talk about all
this shit. It needs to talk to you. I mean what's the deal - an army of people out there thinking up ways to
torture my poor-ass, gentle, loving vagina. Spending their days constructing psycho products, and nasty
ideas to undermine my pussy. Vagina Motherfuckers.
All this shit they're constantly trying to shove up us, clean us up - stuff us up, make it go away. Well, my
vagina's not going away. It's pissed off and it's staying right here. Like tampons - what the hell is that? ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

My trip to the former Yugoslavia had opened the world for me, and my hunger for the world. In doing so, it undid the contained, safe borders of my existence. Suddenly a woman weeping over her lost son in an image on the front page of The New York Times was no longer a theoretical entity. She was real, a woman I might have met, might have known. I was connected to her. I could no longer divorce myself from her pain, her suffering. Initially this was overwhelming. I had nightmares. I felt restless and wrong in my comforting life in America. Everything seemed absurd and pointless. I came to understand why we block out the pain and atrocities of others. That pain, if we allow it to enter us, makes our lives impossible. It forces us to examine our own values and reality. It insists that we be responsible for others. It thrusts us into the messy world where there are no easy solutions or reasons, only struggles and questions. It creates great fissures in the landscape of our insulated, so-called safe reality. Fissures that, once split open, can never close again. It compels us to act. ~ Eve Ensler

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

How come we have money to kill but no money to feed or heal? How come we have money to destroy but no money for art and schools? The ~ Eve Ensler

We are able to cross and dissolve all kinds of borders if we are willing to go to the political, emotional, and spiritual places we most fear and resist. ~ Eve Ensler

People are sad. People are broke. People are worried about money, people are worried that they're not enough and not amounting to anything and they don't feel good about themselves. People have rough times, and everybody's pretending it's not true, and we need to break that veneer. ~ Eve Ensler

I think there are so many children being brought up in some form of violence, be it violence of poverty or sexism or racism or homophobia or transphobia. That violence takes a life to transform or overcome. I don't think people should be spending their lives dealing with that. I think people should be thriving, playing, creating, evolving. ~ Eve Ensler

I want to touch you in real time not find you on YouTube, I want to walk next to you in the mountains not friend you on Facebook. ~ Eve Ensler

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

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

Those of us who have been violated or around violence or cruelty - and really those of us who have simply grown up in a racist, sexist, homophobic world - knew how far we could go, how loud we could get, how big we could become, how much space or attention we could occupy. We learned the price we had to pay for our bigness, our desire, and our ambition. We were practiced at the dance. We cherished the walls of our confines because they gave definition to our lives, boundaries. We wrongly believed this was safety, protection. We made sure someone was assigned to bring us down a notch, remind us who we really are, hold the truth of our badness. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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

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. ~ Eve Ensler

Why don't we teach sex the way we teach math or history? It is such a deeply crucial and healing part of life and we offer no road map. I think it is core to ending violence. ~ Eve Ensler

Stop fixing your bodies and start fixing the world! ~ Eve Ensler

I think that's part of the whole denial and suicidal mechanism [ of the human's race] right "Oh my God, the house is on fire." You sleep through the smoke. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

The cancer in me became an awareness of the cancer that is everywhere. The cancer of cruelty, the cancer of carelessness, the cancer of greed. ~ Eve Ensler

I believe in irony. And if V-Day has taught me anything, it's that if you go out with artistic, outrageous irony and humor, people are drawn to it. ~ Eve Ensler

Some days I would get so exhausted, nauseous, in pain - just from going back through things. It's almost as if I had the experience and then the meta-experience. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

I feel passionate about nurses. I would do anything for nurses. Anything. ~ Eve Ensler

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

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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

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. ~ Eve Ensler

We must stop being polite and behaved, and find new inventive tactics to shift the paradigm. We are the majority. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

I came out of the nine-hour surgery and I had tubes in every direction, and those nurses at the Mayo Clinic, I could cry for four days at the kindness of those nurses. The care, the detail of the care, the attention that just never wavered, never complained. The love. ~ Eve Ensler

I think the human species is very suicidal. ~ Eve Ensler

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

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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 ... ~ Eve Ensler

I think about Marvin Gaye and 'Sexual Healing.' What a radical idea that sex was healing. I learned my politics through that music. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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 ~ Eve Ensler

I was a young feminist in the '70s. Feminism saved my life. It gave me a life. But I saw how so much of what people were saying was not matching up with what they were doing. For example, we were talking about sister solidarity, and women were putting each other down. We were talking about standing up for our rights, and women weren't leaving abusive relationships with men. There were just so many disconnects. ~ Eve Ensler

I live with that contradiction daily. It is a constant struggle. I struggle very deeply. I don't think I've said this to anyone, but I've wondered if I just want to give up this world and live in the Congo and just be there. But I don't think that's what they need from me ~ Eve Ensler

Slavery is back
but never went away ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

Something is unfolding. It is both mystical and practical. It requires that we show up, do our exercise, and get out of the way. In order for the human race to continue, women must be safe and empowered. It's an obvious idea, but like a vagina, it needs great attention and love in order to be revealed. ~ Eve Ensler

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." ~ Eve Ensler

The mechanism of violence is what destroys women, controls women, diminishes women and keeps women in their so-called place. ~ Eve Ensler

Between the combination of Judeo-Christian religious 'be good be good be good' and Capitalist 'something's wrong with you, buy this' and the parental upbringing, which is 'you're wrong, you're not thin enough, you're not smart enough' I mean, hello! We don't have a shot. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

If you are trying to please, how do you take responsibility for your own needs? How do you even know what your own needs are? What do you have to cut off in yourself in order to please others? I think the act of pleasing makes everything murky. We lose track of ourselves. We stop uttering declaratory sentences. We stop directing our lives. We wait to be rescued. We forget what we know. We make everything okay rather than real. ~ Eve Ensler

Naming things, breaking through taboos and denial is the most dangerous, terrifying, and crucial work. This has to happen in spite of political climates or coercions, in spite of careers being won or lost, in spite of the fear of being criticized, outcast, or disliked. I believe freedom begins with naming things. Humanity is preserved by it. ~ Eve Ensler

It seems to me that we spend an inordinate amount of time and attention on fixing ourselves when we could really be directing that out to serving others, ~ Eve Ensler

Stop trying to fix your body. It was never broken. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

I am so grateful to be alive. It's ridiculous to be alive. ~ Eve Ensler

I have been struggling to find my way back into my body my whole life. ~ Eve Ensler

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. ~ Eve Ensler

Today the United States has the highest prison population in the world, over 2.1 million people ... We lock people up at a rate that is seven to ten times that of any other democracy. ~ Eve Ensler

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? ~ Eve Ensler