Eve Ensler Quotes

#1. Eve Ensler is a hero of mine. She's been working for the rights of women for a long time.

Marcia Wallace

#2. For millions of women and men around the world, the playwright Eve Ensler is a beloved figure. She represents the epitome of the politically engaged artist, someone who uses her creative brilliance to illuminate injustice and give voice to the voiceless.

Jackson Katz

#3. 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

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

Eve Ensler

#5. Slavery is back
but never went away

Eve Ensler

#6. If overthrowing some five thousand years of patriarchy seems like a big order, just focus on celebrating each self-respect step along the way

Eve Ensler

#7. Women secretly love to talk about their vaginas. They get very excited, mainly because no one has ever asked them before.

Eve Ensler

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

Eve Ensler

#9. 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

#10. Whatever culture, whatever country, girls are taught to please others as opposed to pleasing themselves.

Eve Ensler

#11. If you listen to the real in you, that part that's pulsing and has questions and is trying to figure something out, it will shape your life in a way where, when you get to be sixty, you'll succeed. You'll be happy about your life.

Eve Ensler

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

Eve Ensler

#13. I feel passionate about nurses. I would do anything for nurses. Anything.

Eve Ensler

#14. Anorexia was my attempt to have control over my body and manipulate my body and starve my body and shape my body. It was not a very good relationship. It was the sort of relationship my father had to my body. It was a tyrannical, "you'll do what I tell you" relationship.

Eve Ensler

#15. 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.

Eve Ensler

#16. One of the most radical things women can do is to love their body.

Eve Ensler

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. The love is all around us. I made a life of love.

Eve Ensler

#23. I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas
a community, a culture of vaginas. There's so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them
like the Bermunda Triangle.

Eve Ensler

#24. It became a kind of passion. Discovering the key, unlocking the vagina's mouth, unlocking this voice, this wild song.

Eve Ensler

#25. The only point of having power it seems to me is to empower others. The only point of leadership is to inspire.

Eve Ensler

#26. 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

#27. It's a totally ridiculous, completely unsexy word. If you use it during sex, trying to be politically correct
"Darling, could you stroke my vagina?"
you kill the act right there. I'm worried about vaginas, what we call them and don't call them.

Eve Ensler

#28. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back.

Eve Ensler

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. People think that when you're connected with other people it's more painful. The opposite is true. When you're connected to the river you have despair, but you also have joy, and there's a flow in the river.

Eve Ensler

#34. 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

#35. When you destroy a population, once femicide happens, we're going to see the end of humanity, because I don't know how you sustain a future without vitalised women.

Eve Ensler

#36. When we give in the world what we want the most, we heal the broken part inside each of us.

Eve Ensler

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. I think the thing that has always made me happy is being in the struggle, in a community of struggle with other people.

Eve Ensler

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

Eve Ensler

#45. 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

#46. What happened with cancer was that I just became a body. There was nothing else but body for a month. I was chemo'd and operated on and cut and poked. At first it was really horrifying and scary, and then it was just,Wow. You're in your body. This is body!

Eve Ensler

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

Eve Ensler

#48. I think that it was really rock-and-roll stars, women who were breaking boundaries with their bodies and their voices and their beings and their music. I spent a lot of time at concerts,just watching women rock out. They expressed so much of what I believed could be possible.

Eve Ensler

#49. 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

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

Eve Ensler

#51. 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

#52. 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

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

Eve Ensler

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. I try not to think about what people think of me. You can't, because then you get hung up in all the people who love you, and you've also got all the people who hate you, because of what you're doing.

Eve Ensler

#57. If you are connected to your own internal being, it is very hard to be screwing and destroying and hurting another human being, because you'll be feeling what they're feeling. If you're separated, it's not a hard thing to do at all.

Eve Ensler

#58. Money doesn't make you special, it makes you lucky. Be generous, be crazy, be outrageous.

Eve Ensler

#59. I was born in Manhattan and grew up in Scarsdale. Scarsdale didn't work for me as a place at all.

Eve Ensler

#60. 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

#61. 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.

Eve Ensler

#62. 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

#63. Before cancer, I was obviously disconnected. I had a tumor the size of a mango inside me and didn't do anything about it. It wasn't like I didn't know something was wrong.

Eve Ensler

#64. I think that anytime you get clear about what your mission is or what your focus wants to be, things start to come together in your life.

Eve Ensler

#65. 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

#66. I think what's been true across the board is the universal patriarchy, the fear of women ever being born back into complete sexuality and life-force. This manifests itself in different cultural variances, but that's really what's going on everywhere.

Eve Ensler

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. The minute someone tells you you have cancer, it's kind of like you die. You really do die. It's like you get that you're mortal.

Eve Ensler

#71. 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.

Eve Ensler

#72. 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

#73. Cancer essentially lives in us and becomes activated at some point, and then cells begin to psychotically divide. Initially, the cancer cell looks like other cells and the body invites it in.

Eve Ensler

#74. Theater has an incredible capacity to move people to social change, to address issues, to inspire social revolution.

Eve Ensler

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. Women not only get violated, but then we take on the struggle to end it too ... As a man, how could the destruction of women be anything to you but devastating? Think about the fact that the women being hurt are your mothers, daughters, sisters.

Eve Ensler

#78. 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

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

Eve Ensler

#80. 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.

Eve Ensler

#81. 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

#82. Stop fixing your bodies and start fixing the world!

Eve Ensler

#83. 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

#84. 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.

Eve Ensler

#85. Dance is holy, sexual, and it's a way of being very powerful and a little dangerous without being violent.

Eve Ensler

#86. Three of the ten principles governing the City of Joy are (a) tell the truth, (b) stop waiting to be rescued, and (c) give away what you want the most.

Eve Ensler

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

Eve Ensler

#88. 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

#89. In the United States, the last recorded clitoridectomy for curing masturbation was performed in 1948
on a five year old girl.

Eve Ensler

#90. 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.

Eve Ensler

#91. I wake up every day and I think, 'I'm breathing! It's a good day.'

Eve Ensler

#92. You will touch this joy and you will suddenly know it is what you were looking for your whole life, but you were afraid to even acknowledge the absence because the hunger for it was so encompassing.

Eve Ensler

#93. I am an emotional I am an emotional, devotional, incandotional creature.

Eve Ensler

#94. 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.

Eve Ensler

#95. 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.

Eve Ensler

#96. 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

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

Eve Ensler

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. I would rate the fact that I get to be alive a big beautiful 10. Satisfaction with myself - work in progress.

Eve Ensler