Marilyn French Quotations

Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can't even think straight.

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

Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.

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?

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

Anyone determined to find another person or group inferior can always find whole lists of grounds that demonstrate inferiority because we are all inferior to the ideals of humanness we have erected.

'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.

To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, is more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.

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.

Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape?

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

Not many men have both good fortune and good sense.

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.

To nourish children and raise then against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.

Everywhere in the world, men place all or most of the burden of raising children and maintaining the home on women, but pretend that this burden is not work; they do not reward it as work or count it as work in global accounting, in either developing

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

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.

rain is one thing the British do better than anybody else.

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

It isn't success after all, is it, if it isn't an expression of your deepest energies?

All patriarchists exalt the home and family as sacred, demanding it remain inviolate from prying eyes. Men want privacy for their violations of women... All women learn in childhood that women as a sex are men's prey.

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.

If you ask me what I believe in today, I believe in feminism. I believe that all human beings are equal. I believe that no one has the right to authority over anyone else. Feminism has to do with everything in the world, a vision of how the world can be. I have great doubts about Utopias, but I just keep on thinking there is a better way to live than the way we live now.

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

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

In a great gasp, puts her head in her hands again and cries as if her throat were a cave, as if the howling winds came from her belly, she cries like a storm that will never end.

It's strange how men feel they have the right to criticize a woman's appearance to her face.

Desire consumes you, it takes you over. You forget yourself completely. All you can think about is the other, the one you desire, your self is just a fire.

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.

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.

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

Never underestimate the power of helplessness!

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.

loneliness is not a longing for company, it is a longing for kind. And kind means people who can see you who you are, and that means they have enough intelligence and sensitivity and patience to do that.

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.

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

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.

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.

There is no power greater than the power of passive dependency.

The very notion of superiority of one kind over another will have to disappear, although differences among kind will remain.

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.

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'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.

Losing the future is the best thing that ever happened to me.

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

All men are rapists and that's all they are

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.

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.

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

The same men who are blind and deaf to feminism are acutely sensitive to what threatens their dominance and privilege.

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 view of life as a struggle for power generates a language in which life has no significance and only power matters.

All the women I know feel a little like outlaws.

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

To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.