Eve Ensler Quotes

#1. 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.'

Eve Ensler

#2. You have to give to the world the thing that you want the most, in order to fix the broken parts inside you.

Eve Ensler

#3. I did not want to see how careless this whole system is for so many, how easy it is to fall through the cracks.

Eve Ensler

#4. 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.

Eve Ensler

#5. 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.

Eve Ensler

#6. 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.

Eve Ensler

#7. 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.

Eve Ensler

#8. I have always been obsessed with naming things. If I could name them, I could know them. If I could name them, I could tame them. They could be my friends.

Eve Ensler

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

Eve Ensler

#10. 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.

Eve Ensler

#11. Give voice to what you know to be true, and do not be afraid of being disliked or exiled. I think that's the hard work of standing up for what you see.

Eve Ensler

#12. I really want to help stop violence toward women.

Eve Ensler

#13. 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."

Eve Ensler

#14. We have no idea how many women were raped in wars - because no one ever asked. So sometimes when people say statistics have escalated, I wonder if, that is true or are we just hearing about things now that we didn't hear about before.

Eve Ensler

#15. About violence, what it feels like to be nothing to someone else. What it feels like to be a consequence of someone else's dissociated rage, disconnected fury.

Eve Ensler

#16. I think the world is always improving and always not improving. I think that both are simultaneously happening all the time.

Eve Ensler

#17. 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.

Eve Ensler

#18. I am not saying people shouldn't be held accountable for terrible acts. But holding people in prisons does not necessarily make them responsible or accountable. It makes them bad. It makes them evil. It puts an end to any process of transformation. It hardens them spiritually and psychologically.

Eve Ensler

#19. Real security is contemplating death, not pretending it doesn't exist.

Eve Ensler

#20. 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.

Eve Ensler

#21. 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,

Eve Ensler

#22. For the most part, political correctness doesn't exist here.
- Toby, Marymount Manhattan College

Eve Ensler

#23. I did not live in the forests. I lived in the concrete city where I could not see the sky or sunset or stars. I moved at the pace of engines and it was faster than my own breath. I became a stranger to myself and to the rhythms of the Earth.

Eve Ensler

#24. I think to be cut off from your heart is the greatest tyranny in the world.

Eve Ensler

#25. 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.

Eve Ensler

#26. I honestly never understood how violence against women became a women's issue. 95 percent of the violence men are doing to women.

Eve Ensler

#27. 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.

Eve Ensler

#28. 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

Eve Ensler

#29. Stop shoving things up me. Stop shoving and stop cleaning it up. My vagina doesn't need to be cleaned up. It smells good already. Not like rose petals. Don't try to decorate.

Eve Ensler

#30. 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.

Eve Ensler

#31. I despise charity. It gives crumbs to a few and silences the others.

Eve Ensler

#32. Slowly, it dawned on me that nothing was more important than stopping violence toward women - that the desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honor and protect life

Eve Ensler

#33. What does your vagina smell like?' ANSWER: 'My husband's face.

Eve Ensler

#34. Slavery is back
but never went away

Eve Ensler

#35. 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.

Eve Ensler

#36. I want to read
so I can read the Koran
read the signs in the street
know the number of the bus
I'm supposed to take
when I one day leave this house.

Eve Ensler

#37. 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,

Eve Ensler

#38. I think the human species is very suicidal.

Eve Ensler

#39. To have insurance and have a diagnosis and to have doctors, I just felt it would be immoral on some level to complain.

Eve Ensler

#40. Geography does not define you - love does.

Eve Ensler

#41. 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.

Eve Ensler

#42. The mechanism of violence is what destroys women, controls women, diminishes women and keeps women in their so-called place.

Eve Ensler

#43. We are able to cross and dissolve all kinds of borders if we are willing to go to the political, emotional, and spiritual places we most fear and resist.

Eve Ensler

#44. How come we have money to kill but no money to feed or heal? How come we have money to destroy but no money for art and schools? The

Eve Ensler

#45. The desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honor and protect life and that this failing would, if we did not correct it, be the end of us all. p. xxxii

Eve Ensler

#46. I think so much of my early life, even though I grew up White and middle class, I was completely shattered by the horrifically violent atmosphere I grew up in. I am a consequence of violence. That opened a door to many realities that I would not have experienced had I not survived what I did.

Eve Ensler

#47. 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.

Eve Ensler

#48. Women are the primary resource of the planet. They give birth, we come from them. They are mothers, they are visionaries, they are the future. If we can figure out how to make women feel safe and honor women, it would be parallel or equal to honoring life itself.

Eve Ensler

#49. 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.

Eve Ensler

#50. I want to touch you in real time not find you on YouTube, I want to walk next to you in the mountains not friend you on Facebook.

Eve Ensler

#51. 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.

Eve Ensler

#52. We don't accept your world your rules your wars We don't accept your cruelty and unkindness. We don't believe some need to suffer for others to survive or that there isn't enough to go around or that corporations are the only and best economic arrangement. And

Eve Ensler

#53. 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.

Eve Ensler

#54. People ask me all the time how I survived. It wasn't that I was smarter or even stronger than anyone else. I didn't even know what I was doing. It was just that something inside me couldn't go along.

Eve Ensler

#55. 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.

Eve Ensler

#56. I began to see my body like an iPad or a car. I would drive it and demand things from it. It had no limits. It was invincible. It was to be conquered and mastered like the Earth herself.

Eve Ensler

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

Eve Ensler

#58. 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?

Eve Ensler

#59. I believe in fierce love, pushing the edge, calling the robbers, the corporates, the elites, the pillagers and insanely wealthy to task, going whatever distance we need to go now to protect our earth and each other.

Eve Ensler

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

Eve Ensler

#61. That we find freedom, aliveness and power not from what contains, locates, or protects us but from what dissolves, reveals and expands us.

Eve Ensler

#62. 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.

Eve Ensler

#63. Be transparent as wind, be as possible and relentless and dangerous, be what moves things forward without needing to leave a mark, be part of this collection of molecules that begins somewhere unknown and can't help but keep rising. Rising.Rising. Rising.

Eve Ensler

#64. I finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense. (xxvi)

Eve Ensler

#65. 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.

Eve Ensler

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

Eve Ensler

#67. 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.

Eve Ensler

#68. 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.

Eve Ensler

#69. 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.

Eve Ensler

#70. 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.

Eve Ensler

#71. If you are divided from your body, then you are divided from the body of the world.

Eve Ensler

#72. I bet you're worried. I was worried. I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don't think about them.

Eve Ensler

#73. 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.

Eve Ensler

#74. 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."

Eve Ensler

#75. My commitment originated in my own story and my own relationship to violence.

Eve Ensler

#76. 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.

Eve Ensler

#77. Political change and academic change and intellectual change are obviously crucial, but they don't necessarily change society. They can change a particular class and give everybody in that class great arguments, but that doesn't necessarily translate into the body of the culture.

Eve Ensler

#78. We must stop being polite and behaved, and find new inventive tactics to shift the paradigm. We are the majority.

Eve Ensler

#79. 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.

Eve Ensler

#80. Prostration: placing the body in reverence, to submit, to surrender. In many faiths it is used to relinquish the ego. In Tibetan tantric Buddhism they do one hundred thousand prostrations to overcome pride. In Islam, prostration has been known to overcome many diseases.

Eve Ensler

#81. 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.

Eve Ensler

#82. Security is elusive. It's impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. People change us. Nothing is secure.

Eve Ensler

#83. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired.

Eve Ensler

#84. 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.

Eve Ensler

#85. 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.

Eve Ensler

#86. Do you say that tree isn't pretty cause it doesn't look like that tree? We're all trees. You're a tree. I'm a tree. You've got to love your body, Eve. You've got to love your tree. Love your tree. (Leah)

Eve Ensler

#87. Stop trying to fix your body. It was never broken.

Eve Ensler

#88. Wanting to fall in love and being totally unable to trust, hungering for connection and always finding it claustrophobic.

Eve Ensler

#89. The African specialist Nahid Toubia puts it plain [when speaking of female genital mutilation]: In a man it would range from amoutation of most of the penis, to removal of all the penis, its roots of soft tissue and part of the scrotal skin.

Eve Ensler

#90. The clitoris is pure in purpose. It is the only organ in the body designed purely for pleasure.

Eve Ensler

#91. Good is towing the line, being behaved, being quiet, being passive, fitting in, being liked, and great is being messy, having a belly, speaking your mind, standing up for what you believe in, fighting for another paradigm, not letting people talk you out of what you know to be true.

Eve Ensler

#92. Dance has a transformative effect on bodily trauma.

Eve Ensler

#93. There were momentary visitations. I was a visitor, not an inhabitant. I think I say that at the beginning of the book: "I have made visits to the earth in my body, but it's always been as a visitor."

Eve Ensler

#94. I think we just have to look at all the ways in which we are violating the Earth, each other, economic violence, racial violence, environmental violence - where we are dominating and not cooperating .

Eve Ensler

#95. To speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humour, to make them visible so that can not be ravaged in the dark without great consequence.

Eve Ensler

#96. Everything you deny is actually killing you on some level. You see something, you feel something wrong with your body, you pretend it's not happening, it goes on, it grows, it gets worse.

Eve Ensler

#97. I have been a depressed person most of m life. I was always in the throes of self-hatred.

Eve Ensler

#98. 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.

Eve Ensler

#99. 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.

Eve Ensler

#100. 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 ...

Eve Ensler