Eve Ensler Quotes
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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.
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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.
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In America, we have a government that is now run by white nationalists, by billionaires, by incredible misogynists.
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I'd stop calling it "chemotherapy." I'd call it "transformational juice." Infusion suites would become "transformational suites" or "journey rooms."
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…find freedom, aliveness, and power not from what contains, locates, or protects us, but from what dissolves, reveals, and expands us.
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The clitoris is pure in purpose. It is the only organ in the body designed purely for pleasure.
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I think to be cut off from your heart is the greatest tyranny in the world.
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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.
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When you rape, beat, maim, mutilate, burn, bury, and terrorize women, you destroy the essential life energy on the planet.
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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.
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Theater has an incredible capacity to move people to social change, to address issues, to inspire social revolution.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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What if, instead of being afraid of even talking about death, we saw our lives in some ways as preparation for it. What if we were taught to ponder it and reflect on it and talk about it and enter it and rehearse it and try it on?What if, rather than being cast out and defined by some terminal category, you were identified as someone in the middle of a transformation that could deepen your soul, open your heart, and all the while-even if and particularly when you were dying-you would be supported by and be part of a community?
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Once you are diagnosed with cancer, time changes. It both speeds up insanely and stops altogether.
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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.
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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.
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I feel passionate about nurses. I would do anything for nurses. Anything.
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Anorexia was my attempt to have control over my body and manipulate my body and starve my body and shape my body. It was not a very good relationship. It was the sort of relationship my father had to my body. It was a tyrannical, "you'll do what I tell you" relationship.
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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.
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There is just so much excess in terms of the market for self-remodeling. I think most women are perfectly gorgeous and beautiful the way they are.
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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.
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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.