Eve Ensler Quotes
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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.
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I wake up every day and I think, 'I'm breathing! It's a good day.'
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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.
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We can't walk where we want to walk or be who we want to be or dress the way we want to dress or go anywhere any time of day. I am talking about the freedom that comes with just knowing that you're okay, and that you have value and you have identity, and you don't have to keep proving yourself.
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The cancer in me became an awareness of the cancer that is everywhere. The cancer of cruelty, the cancer of carelessness, the cancer of greed.
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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!"
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I think of the security of cages. How violence, cruelty, oppression, become a kind of home, a familiar pattern, a cage, in which we know how to operate and define ourselves.
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We have to bridge and join our struggles and understand how we can't fight violence against women without looking at racism, we can't fight violence against women without looking at economic deprivation or climate change. All these struggles are interconnected.
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The fact that women have been moving forward, that a woman was running for president, that we had a black president - I think there was, without a doubt, a whitelash and a complete backlash against the liberation of women, against the power of people of color.
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Between the combination of Judeo-Christian religious 'be good be good be good' and Capitalist 'something's wrong with you, buy this' and the parental upbringing, which is 'you're wrong, you're not thin enough, you're not smart enough' I mean, hello! We don't have a shot.
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I think we are seeing the absolute and utter collapse of male politicians in this U.S country and we're seeing what the underpinnings of the power structure are, which are sexist underpinnings.
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I feel sometimes with boys that the tyranny of patriarchy has had a much more devastating blow on boys than it has on anyone. Because they have literally been forced to disassociate from their hearts.
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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.
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When I was younger I felt very disempowered, very disappeared. I felt worthless, like I had no right to exist. I think a good part of my life was spent recovering from that. Pulling myself out of that.
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Today the United States has the highest prison population in the world, over 2.1 million people. ... We lock people up at a rate that is seven to ten times that of any other democracy.
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Security isn't what I hunger for. I hunger for change. I hunger for connection.
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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.
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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.
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Dance is holy, sexual, and it's a way of being very powerful and a little dangerous without being violent.
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I don't get tired, because every time a woman doesn't die or doesn't get beaten or doesn't get raped or doesn't get honor-killed or doesn't get acid-burned, it's a huge victory.
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We have not yet made violence against women abnormal, extraordinary, unacceptable. We have not yet come to see it as a pathological issue.
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When I was younger I was much more polemical and didactic, much less trusting. Inherently my own vision of the world would weave its way through the characters. Also, my concerns are changing. What happens is you write a few plays and get boxed into some idea of what your concerns are and what you're supposed to be writing about.
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I think we have a tendency in America to keep dividing ourselves, separating ourselves from each other.
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I think being an activist and an artist is an interesting contradiction, because so often they are at odds with one another. When you write as an artist you have to clean the palate of your own politics in creating characters and activism is kind of the exact opposite.