Eve Ensler Quotes
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Stop trying to fix your body. It was never broken.
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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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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.
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I really believe that is helping people. I've been talking to oncologists about how we can re-frame and re-think the chemo process, so it becomes a much more spiritual, psychological journey. Where people really could burn away what needs to be burned away. It's happening anyway. Why not frame it in a psychological way where it can serve as a transformation?
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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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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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I think to be cut off from your heart is the greatest tyranny in the world.
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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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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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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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…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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Theater has an incredible capacity to move people to social change, to address issues, to inspire social revolution.
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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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The clitoris is pure in purpose. It is the only organ in the body designed purely for pleasure.
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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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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.
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In America, we have to really be working on two fronts right now. Immediately, we have to be rising in resistance and protecting our Muslim brothers and sisters and every marginalized person under threat and siege. At the same time, we have to be planning and envisioning where we're going. How we build moments and movements, how we come up with the vision we want of a progressive left - that's what comes in after.
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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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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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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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This artistic uprising we had the other night in Washington Square park: there was poetry, there was dance, there was song, there was spoken word; and people left feeling so inspired and so energised. We have to get ourselves out of this syndrome of trauma and being re-traumatised. Art releases this energy. It exposes us to wonder again, and magic again, and ambiguity - all the things we need to really keep going and fighting and resisting in these times.
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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 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.
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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..."