Wittig Quotes

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 ... ~ Monique Wittig

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. ~ Monique Wittig

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. ~ Monique Wittig

There is nothing like a grocery list to remind us how human we are. ~ Susan Wittig Albert

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

I refuse to pronounce the names of possession and nonpossession. ~ Monique Wittig

If I'd known how the week was going to turn out I would have sent it back first thing Monday and asked for a refund. ~ Susan Wittig Albert

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

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

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

Living in a culture that prefers to shut out the dark, avoid shadows, and anesthetize pain means that many people are isolated ... Family, friends, and co-workers, fearful of the dark, are reluctant to participate in our shadow experience and may urge us to be done with the dark before it is done with us. ~ Susan Wittig Albert

Grown up at last and required to live all day long in the real world, it now seemed to Beatrix that imaginary fairies were of a great deal more use than real ones. And I think we must agree with her on that score. It is undeniably true that the imagination is far more powerful than knowledge, and that it is much more important to believe in something than to know it! There is, after all, a limit to the things we can know (even if we are fortunate enough to be geniuses), but no limit whatsoever to the things we might imagine. And if we cannot imagine, we will never know what we have yet to learn, for imagination shows us what is possible before knowledge leads us to what is true. For Beatrix, dreaming, imagining, creating, improvising, and fancying redeemed the stern and sometimes frightening world in which she lived, and allowed her to transform it. ~ Susan Wittig Albert

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

The healing that can grow out of the simple act of telling our stories is often quite remarkable. Even more remarkably, this healing is not just our own healing, it is the healing of all women. That's why, as we tell our stories to ourselves, it is also important to share them with others. This sharing brings a sense of kinship, of sisterhood. We understand that we are not alone in our efforts to become conscious, whole, healthy persons. ~ Susan Wittig Albert

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

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

The bearers of fables are very welcome. ~ Monique Wittig

Does that mean you're prepared to deal with whatever turns up? People aren't sometimes. When they learn the real truth, they're all of a sudden content to live with a lie. ~ Susan Wittig Albert

One person's weed is another person's wildflower. ~ Susan Wittig Albert

But as it turned out, the two had a great deal in common, for both Bailey and Thackeray (named for the famous novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair) were devoted bibliophiles who believed that "a book a day kept the world at bay," as Thackeray was fond of saying. Bailey was the offspring of a generation of badgers who insisted that "Reader" was the most rewarding vocation to which a virtuous badger might be called and who gauged their week's anticipated pleasure by the height of their to-be-read pile. (Perhaps you know people like this. I do.) ~ Susan Wittig Albert

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. ~ Monique Wittig

We are the only ones who can tell our stories because we are the only ones who have lived them. ~ Susan Wittig Albert

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. ~ Monique Wittig

One is a writer, or one is not. ~ Monique Wittig

Our stories arise from our hearts and our souls. In this sense, telling our stories becomes a sacred gesture, opening a clear way to that deep, ecstatic center where we are most uniquely our selves, individual and unique, and yet are ourselves, joined together at the heart. ~ Susan Wittig Albert

Music keeps time and defies time, simultaneously. ~ Susan Wittig Albert

So the badger poked up the fire, poured himself another cup of tea, and went back to the History to read the curious story of the Fern Vale dwelves, a story (he suspected) that was mostly unknown to the Big Folk. Of course, that sort of thing wasn't at all unusual, for although the human residents of the Land between the Lakes thought they knew everything about their surroundings, and although scholarly books related the history, inventoried the animals and plants, and catalogued the folktales, people were aware of only a fraction of what went on around them. One was not criticizing when one said this; one was simply stating the fact. Humans, by and large, were ignorant of the mysteries of life and land. ~ Susan Wittig Albert

Maude regards the ones who don't make it as her own personal failures. "I guess I didn't put enough emphasis on 'until death do you part,'" she says sourly, whenever she hears about the latest divorce. "Sad to say, but some are in it just for the good times. Married folks, they gotta be like that cat's claw acacia I've got growin' in my yard. Gotta grab hard and hold on tight when the going gets rough. Only way to get through the bad times. Grab hard, hold on, and ride. No matter what. ~ Susan Wittig Albert

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. ~ Monique Wittig

Wittig appears to take issue with genitally organized sexuality per se and to call for an alternative economy of pleasures which would both contest the construction of female subjectivity marked by women's supposedly distinctive reproductive function. ~ Judith Butler

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. ~ Monique Wittig