Eve Ensler Quotations

Well, the tyranny of masculinity and the tyranny of patriarchy I think has been much more deadly to men than it has to women. It hasn't killed our hearts. It's killed men's hearts. It's silenced them; it's cut them off.

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'.

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

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.

I'm a nomad. I have a place in New York in the Flatiron District, and I have a place in Paris in Ile Saint-Louis, and I spend a lot of time in Congo.

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.

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

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.

People think that when you're connected with other people it's more painful. The opposite is true. When you're connected to the river you have despair, but you also have joy, and there's a flow in the river.

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 think the world is always improving and always not improving. I think that both are simultaneously happening all the time. I don't think it's one motion unfortunately - I wish we could say it's better, better, better - but I think it's better, bad, better, bad - you know?

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

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

I've been involved in social activism my entire life, and I would argue that many people involved in social activist movements have done very little work on themselves.

I really want to help stop violence toward women.

Geography does not define you - love does.

I think when people begin to tell their stories, everything changes, because not only are you legitimized 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.

My dream is that people will find a way back home, into their bodies, to connect with the earth, to connect with each other, to connect with the poor, to connect with the broken, to connect with the needy, to connect with people calling out all around us, to connect with the beauty, poetry, the wildness.

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.

I'm in good shape. My cancer means I have lost a lot of organs and I'm a lot lighter. I have devoted myself to yoga and I'm doing handstands.

I think I've always had these two currents, equally strong, of wanting to change the world and make the world better and fight injustices and fight violence, and then being an artist, which is a very different strain.

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.

When you listen to other women’s stories, you begin to understand your own better, and you begin to find ways back through and with each other.

Dance has a transformative effect on bodily trauma.

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.

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.

Security isn't what I hunger for. I hunger for change. I hunger for connection.

The older you get, the more you are aware that everybody has a certain way of seeing things, which they have to honour.

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.

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.

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.

I grew up in a tradition where having ideas and contributing to the community and creating art that had an impact on the world mattered. That's part of the Jewish tradition.

When you destroy a population, once femicide happens, we're going to see the end of humanity, because I don't know how you sustain a future without vitalised women.

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

I was born in Manhattan and grew up in Scarsdale. Scarsdale didn't work for me as a place at all.

The minute someone tells you you have cancer, it's kind of like you die. You really do die. It's like you get that you're mortal.

Whatever culture, whatever country, girls are taught to please others as opposed to pleasing themselves.

For many years now, I feel like my own body struggle has been linked and connected with women I meet in the world. I think we're in this together.

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

Since cancer, I feel like I have dreams rather than ambitions, visions rather than plans.

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.

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.

I was a waitress for nine years, which I don't regret at all. It taught me about discipline. I was always writing; it took a long time to make a career of it.

If you are connected to your own internal being, it is very hard to be screwing and destroying and hurting another human being, because you’ll be feeling what they’re feeling. If you’re separated, it’s not a hard thing to do at all.

We are focusing on bringing the stories of these women to the world. These stories must be told if we are going to stop this from happening again.

I think it's, hopefully, liberating. The idea is that they'll walk out loving their body and wanting to eat ice cream,

I was drawn to vaginas because of my own personal history, because of sexuality, because women's empowerment is deeply connected to their sexuality. And, I'm obsessed with women being violated and raped, and with incest. All of these things are deeply connected to our vaginas.

We focus on fixing our bodies. We spend $40 billion a year on beauty products. What if we actually took that money, took that time, took that energy and started fixing the world. Women would actually be in power,

I urge you to spend the time to listen to the voice inside of you. I see teenage girls as being the primary fuel of this planet.

Rossellini was going along believing she was at the top of her game,

At first women were reluctant to talk. They were a little shy, but once they got going, you couldn't stop them.

Doing this show is really painful each time I perform it. The degree to which women hate their bodies is profoundly sad. Let's just put off our self-hatred for 10 years, take over the world, and then we can obsess again.

closest to the core contaminated. They live near the reactor; their contamination is the most potent and consuming. As you get further away from the reactor, women are contaminated but not to the degree.

Women not only get violated, but then we take on the struggle to end it too...As a man, how could the destruction of women be anything to you but devastating? Think about the fact that the women being hurt are your mothers, daughters, sisters.

What I would argue is that real spirituality is the ability to keep encountering two opposite thoughts at the same time and still maintain some kind of morality and perspective in the world. It is not the elimination of one side of the equation or the elimination of what you don't like; it is the investigation of everything.

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?"

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.

I think what all of us have in common is that we've been taught and trained and programmed to focus on fixing and mutilating ourselves. That's a core reason why women do not have power in the world.

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.

I got to a nine-hour surgery, I lost lots of body parts and rearranged, I got really months of infection that I lost 30 pounds. But the idea of pumping poison into my bloodstream just - I couldn't, I couldn't.

Each time I had five hours of the poison going into me, I just pictured everything that needed to be burned away. I pictured wars, I pictured the things my father had done to me, I pictured brutality, and when it was over, I am light.

The people who are on the front lines every day in hospitals, nurses, the people who are running clinics, the people who are taking care of your children, those are the people who are the lovers of the world, are the good of the world.

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.

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

Denial is really death. People think that when you're connected with other people it's more painful. The opposite is true. When you're connected to the river you have despair, but you also have joy, and there's a flow in the river.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the things I think about when we talk about a violence,and relationship to spirituality is that it seems to me when you take something from someone that isn't yours or you hurt someone else, fundamentally, you actually do that to yourself. You actually unmake yourself, you work against your own being and your own matter.

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

There is a global epidemic where one out of three women will be beaten or sexually assaulted in their lifetimes? How are we going to build a future of love and connection? And why would this not be of utmost concern to men?

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.

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.

We live in a racist world. Everywhere there is racism. We say to White people, "You really have to examine how you behave in the world. You are responsible for deconstructing internalized racism and being part of a ongoing process of decolonizing yourself."

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 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.

I think one of the problems with the capitalist mainstream is this: no matter what you create to respond or resist it they will buy it.

What I have found is that even when you try to transform existing structures they are so powerful they often overwhelm, seduce, and control you.

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.

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.

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.

There's an underlying puritanicalness in America that is not that different to the prudishness of Britain - it just manifests itself in different ways.

I think what's been true across the board is the universal patriarchy, the fear of women ever being born back into complete sexuality and life-force. This manifests itself in different cultural variances, but that's really what's going on everywhere.

I'm feeling a kind of liberty to write about what's interesting to me without worrying about what I should be writing about. And that feels good.

I think so much of neoliberalism and capitalism has caused people to live in a state of greed, fear and consumption that is covering up so much of what we really want.

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!"

But my body was telling its story. I have read a lot of stuff about cancer. I needed this book. I wish I'd had this book when I had cancer. I wanted someone to be talking to me about "fart floors." I wanted somebody telling me what it was like to have a [colostomy] bag. I felt so alone. And if you're a person who's been traumatized [by past abuse], it's so potentially re-traumatizing. You slip right into "oh my god, this is the only person this has happened to before" mentality: "I'm especially bad and I have especially bad cancer..."

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."

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.

I think we have made progress. There's no doubt about it, we have moved forward. But there's some essential, core thing that has not been deconstructed. And I'm telling you, it's connected to the body. I know it is.

It really occurred to me at a certain point: women have not been embodied. Feminism has not been embodied. It hasn't gotten into us in a way where it is so undeniable that there is nothing to prove. Do you know what I mean? That we are so in our feminist skin, so to speak, that we are that world now.

If the theatre has taught me anything, it's that when things change in the body, in the body politic, in the body of the world, in the body of the earth, in the body of the person, there's change. You never go back.

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 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

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 very passionate that we need CAT scanners in every country in the world. There's not a CAT scanner in all of eastern Congo. People don't use the word "cancer" because they don't get diagnosed. They just die.

I feel passionate about nurses. I would do anything for nurses. Anything.

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.

Then there was sex, which, for me, was such a need. When I was younger, I had a need to have sex with everyone. I don't know where that was coming from, but there was such a need to connect physically - obviously, for me to connect physically to myself. There were times, like I say in the book, where you lay on top of me, when you push me down, when you're inside me.