Top 55 Joanna Russ Quotes
#1. The Winter solstice (you haven't lived if you haven't seen us running around in our skivvies, banging on pots and pans, shouting "Come back, sun! Goddammit, come back! Come back!
Joanna Russ
#2. There are more whooping cranes in the United States of America than there are women in Congress.
Joanna Russ
#3. Chastity is not given once and for all like a wedding ring that is put on never to be taken off, but is a garden which each day must be weeded, watered, and trimmed anew, or soon there will be only brambles and wilderness.
Joanna Russ
#4. Without meaningful work you might as well be dead.
Joanna Russ
#5. What future is there for a female child who aspires to being Humpfrey Bogart?
Joanna Russ
#6. There is this business of the narcissism of love, the fourth-dimensional curve that takes you out into the other who is the whole world, which is really a twist back into yourself, only a different self.
Joanna Russ
#7. Civilization must be preserved,' says he.
'Civilization's doing fine,' I said. 'We just don't happen to be where it is.
Joanna Russ
#8. I know you're competent and your thesis advisor knows you're competent. The question in our minds is are you really serious about what you're doing?"
This was said to a young woman who had already spent five years and over $10,000 getting to that point in her Ph.D. program.
Joanna Russ
#9. Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers' laps and punch the readers' noses.
Rejoice, little book!
For on that day, we will be free
Joanna Russ
#10. If you want to live forever you are dreadfully dangerous because you're not living now.
Joanna Russ
#11. I tried once, you know, went to a dance all dressed up, but I felt like such a fool. Everyone kept making encouraging remarks about my looks as if they were afraid I'd cross back over the line again; I was trying, you know, I was proving their way of life was right, and they were terrified I'd stop.
Joanna Russ
#12. Until you learn better, you think that a landscaped world can't hurt you or please you, you needn't bother about its soul, you needn't be wary of its good looks.
Until you learn better.
Joanna Russ
#13. How withered away one can be from a life of unremitting toil.
Joanna Russ
#14. If you scream, people say you're melodramatic; if you submit, you're masochistic; if you call names, you're a bitch. Hit him and he'll kill you. The best thing is to suffer mutely and yearn for a rescuer, but suppose a rescuer doesn't come?
Joanna Russ
#15. After a while you tame your interior monsters, it's only natural. I don't mean that it ever stops; but it stops mattering.
Joanna Russ
#16. Real artists, it seems to me, are those who don't repeat themselves.
Joanna Russ
#17. I have had my share of trouble and sickness but always somewhere in me there is a little spot of warmth and joy to make it all easier, like a traveler's fire burning out in the wilderness on a cold night.
Joanna Russ
#18. I left her wallpapering her much-loved, much-tended little corner of hell.
Joanna Russ
#19. And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).
Joanna Russ
#20. The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That's the trouble
with women, too."
["Existence" (1975)]
Joanna Russ
#21. Scholars don't usually sit gasping and sobbing in corners of the library stacks.
But they should. They should.
Joanna Russ
#22. Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur.
Joanna Russ
#23. I didn't and don't want to be a 'feminine' version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version of the heroes I admire. I want to be the heroes themselves.
Joanna Russ
#24. In my sleep I had a dream and this dream was a dream of guilt. It was not human guilt but the kind of helpless, hopeless despair that would be felt by a small wooden box or geometrical cube if such objects had consciousness; it was the guilt of sheer existence.
Joanna Russ
#25. The demon got up. The demon said Fool. To think you can eat their food and not talk to them. To think you can take their money and not be afraid of them. To think you can depend on their company and not suffer from them.
Joanna Russ
#26. Privileged groups, like everyone else, want to think well of themselves and to believe that they are acting generously and justly.
Joanna Russ
#27. Thinking you are attacking society when you condemn or ravage the hypothetical Nice Girl Next Door is the exact equivalent of thinking that stealing from the local supermarket makes you a Communist.
Joanna Russ
#28. He's beginning to like me. I am a better and better audience as I get numbed, and although I've played this game of Impress You (and won it, too--though I don't like either of the prizes; winning is too much like losing) I'm too tired to go on playing tonight.
Joanna Russ
#29. In my opinion, questions that are based on something real ought to be settled by something real without all this damned lazy miserable drifting
Joanna Russ
#30. Thus in the bad days, in the dark swampy times.
Joanna Russ
#31. She said that instead of conquering Everest, I could conquer the conqueror of Everest and while he had to go climb the mountain, I could stay home in lazy comfort listening to the radio and eating chocolates. She was upset, I suppose, but you can't imbibe someone's success by fucking them.
Joanna Russ
#32. Faith is not contrary to the usual ideas, something that turns out to be right or wrong, like a gambler's bet.
Joanna Russ
#33. How am I to put this together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition?
Joanna Russ
#34. When the memory of one's predecessors is buried, the assumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time. And if no one ever did it beforewhy do we think we can succeed now?
Joanna Russ
#35. And here, of course, we come to the one occupation of a female protagonist in literature, the one thing she can do, and by God she does it and does it and does it, over and over and over again.
She is the protagonist of a Love Story.
Joanna Russ
#36. I think we ought to decide that man-hating is not only respectable but honorable. To be a misandrist a woman needs considerable ingenuity, originality, and resilience. A misogynist requires no such resources.
Joanna Russ
#37. Ignorance is not bad faith. But persistence in ignorance is.
Joanna Russ
#38. As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frog in jest. But the frogs die in earnest.
Joanna Russ
#39. Sit a man on his ass with nothing to do but eat and the first thing that goes is his mind. It never fails.
Joanna Russ
#40. They validate perceptions that need validating, especially in adolescence
ie, under the bland, forced optimism of American life terrible forces are at work, things are not what they seem, and if you feel lonely, persecuted, a misfit, and in terror, you aren't crazy. You're right.
Joanna Russ
#42. To die on a dying Earth - I'd live, if only to weep.
Joanna Russ
#43. An as-yet-unpublished poet in Boulder, Colorado, once said to me that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. I may seem, in the foregoing sketchy pages, to have followed her advice rather too well.
Joanna Russ
#44. Life has to end. What a pity! Sometimes, when one is alone, the universe presses itself into one's hands: a plethora of joy, an organized plentitude.
Joanna Russ
#45. I once asked a young dissertation writer whether her suddenly grayed hair was due to ill health or personal tragedy; she answered: "It was the footnotes".
Joanna Russ
#46. If you want me to do something else useful, you had better show me what that something else is.
Joanna Russ
#47. When one culture has the big guns and the other has none, there is a certain predictablity about the outcome.
Joanna Russ
#48. Art is collective. Always, it has a tradition behind it.
Joanna Russ
#50. (Only God can make a tree and She seldom tries, nowadays.)
Joanna Russ
#51. For years I said Let me in, Love me, Approve me, Define me, Regulate me, Validate me, Support me. Now I say Move over.
Joanna Russ
#52. Men succeed. Women get married.
Men fail. Women get married.
Men enter monasteries. Women get married.
Men start wars. Women get married.
Men stop them. Women get married.
Joanna Russ
#53. Somewhere there is a book that says you ought to cry buckets of tears over yourself and love yourself with a passion and wrap your arms around yourself; only then will you be happy and free. That's a good book.
Joanna Russ
#54. [T]here is one and only one way to possess that in which we are defective, therefore that which we need, therefore that which we want. Become it.
Joanna Russ
#55. There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women.
Joanna Russ
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
