Top 57 Marilyn French Quotes
#2. I'd discovered you never know yourself until you're tested and that you don't even know you're being tested until afterwards, and that in fact there isn't anyone giving the test except yourself.
Marilyn French
#3. But she continued to wonder what the fish tasted like, so brilliant and vivid pink. Would it taste pink?
Marilyn French
#4. The same men who are blind and deaf to feminism are acutely sensitive to what threatens their dominance and privilege.
Marilyn French
#6. Rain is one thing the British do better than anybody else.
Marilyn French
#7. To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, is more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.
Marilyn French
#8. In the beginning was the Mother, the Word began a new era, one we have come to call Patriarchy.
Marilyn French
#9. Survival is an art. It requires the dulling of the mind and the senses, and a delicate attunement to waiting, without insisting on precision about just what it is you are waiting for.
Marilyn French
#10. In a way it doesn't matter whether you open doors or close them, you still end up in a box.
Marilyn French
#12. All my life I've read that the life of the mind is preeminent, and that it can transcend all bodily degradation. But that's just not my experience. When your body has to deal all day with shit and string beans, your mind does too.
Marilyn French
#13. And there are so much easier ways to destroy a woman. You don't have to rape her or kill her; you don't even have to beat her. You can just marry her. You don't even have to do that. You can just let her work in your office for thirty-five dollars a week.
Marilyn French
#14. All patriarchists exalt the home and family as sacred, demanding it remain inviolate from prying eyes. Men want privacy for their violations of women ... All women learn in childhood that women as a sex are men's prey.
Marilyn French
#15. My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of western civilization, to make it a feminist world.
Marilyn French
#16. That's sheer luck too: luck of the draw of birth: century, continent, nation, section, sex, color, socioeconomic sector.
Marilyn French
#17. She drowned in words that could not teach her how to swim.
Marilyn French
#18. Even disasters
there are always disasters when you travel
can be turned into adventures.
Marilyn French
#19. It isn't success after all, is it, if it isn't an expression of your deepest energies?
Marilyn French
#20. It's strange how men feel they have the right to criticize a woman's appearance to her face.
Marilyn French
#21. The view of life as a struggle for power generates a language in which life has no significance and only power matters.
Marilyn French
#22. Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
Marilyn French
#23. I believe that all human beings are equal. I believe that no one has the right to authority over anyone else.
Marilyn French
#24. Anyone determined to find another person or group inferior can always find whole lists of grounds that demonstrate inferiority because we are all inferior to the ideals of humanness we have erected.
Marilyn French
#26. In a great gasp, puts her head in her hands again and cries as if her throat were a cave, as if the howling winds came from her belly, she cries like a storm that will never end.
Marilyn French
#27. The very notion of superiority of one kind over another will have to disappear, although differences among kind will remain.
Marilyn French
#28. One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape ... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.
Marilyn French
#29. Men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.
Marilyn French
#31. Men seem unable to feel equal to women: they must be superior or they are inferior.
Marilyn French
#32. 'I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes,' she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the damned dishes.
Marilyn French
#33. Desire consumes you, it takes you over. You forget yourself completely. All you can think about is the other, the one you desire, your self is just a fire.
Marilyn French
#34. My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water.
Marilyn French
#35. There's power to: and everyone should have that, but everyone doesn't. Power to play Bach, or tennis, or boccie if you like. And there's power over; and no one should have that, but people do.
Marilyn French
#36. The real motivation of the campaign to criminalize abortion is to establish the principles that women's bodies belong to the state and that women bear the responsibility for sex.
Marilyn French
#38. Life felt hideously empty. But she told herself that was only because women are educated to think that marriage will be a sudden panacea to all emptiness, and although she'd fought off such notions, she had no doubt been infected by them.
Marilyn French
#39. Habit is a good thing for the human race ... You have to spend so much energy just getting through the day when you have no habits that you don't have any left for productive labor.
Marilyn French
#40. In Russia they put you in insane asylums if you disagree with the state: it's not so different here. Keep the natives quiet.
Marilyn French
#41. You can't equate passive dependent power with assertive power because the dependent kind isn't fun, it doesn't give you a kick, it just allows you to survive.
Marilyn French
#42. Male territorial insanity yields only to another male. What a difference the possession of a penis makes!
Marilyn French
#43. Some people use bullfights, some the Mass, some art in order to ritualize or transform death into life or at least meaning. But my terror is that life itself is a ritual transforming everything into death.
Marilyn French
#44. Not many men have both good fortune and good sense.
Marilyn French
#45. I have opened all the doors in my head.
I have opened all the pores in my body.
But only the tide rolls in.
Marilyn French
#46. For many people, morality means a set of rules governing the disposition on one's genital organs; or a set of injunctions against lying, stealing, or killing except when such acts are sanctioned by church or state.
Marilyn French
#47. Oh, God, why don't I remember that a little chaos is good for the soul?
Marilyn French
#48. When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress?
Marilyn French
#49. What is a man, anyway? Everything I see around me in popular culture tells me a man is he who screws and kills. But everything I see around me in life tells me a man is he who makes money.
Marilyn French
#50. When a baby first looks at you ... when it laughs that deep, unselfconscious gurgle; or when it cries and you pick it up and it clings sobbing to you ... then you are-happy is not the precise word-filled.
Marilyn French
#51. Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape?
Marilyn French
#52. Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can't even think straight.
Marilyn French
#53. Women are afraid in a world in which almost half the population bears the guise of the predator, in which no factor - age, dress, or color - distinguishes a man who will harm a woman from one who will not.
Marilyn French
#54. I've known for a long time that hypocrisy is the secret of sanity. You mustn't let them know you know.
Marilyn French
#55. Control over a woman is the only form of dominance most men possess, for most men are merely subjects of more powerful men.
Marilyn French
#56. There was no justice, there was only life. And life she had.
Marilyn French
#57. But communes are a good idea. People criticize communes because they don't last, but why in hell, will you tell me, should they last? Why does an order have to become a permanent order? Maybe we should live one way for some years, then try another.
Marilyn French
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