Eve Ensler famous quotes

Dancing insists we take up space, and though it has no set direction, we go there together. Dance is dangerous, joyous, sexual, holy, disruptive, and contagious and it breaks the rules. It can happen anywhere, at anytime, with anyone and everyone, and it's free. Dance joins us and pushes us to go further and that is why it's at the center of ONE BILLION RISING.
-- Eve Ensler

#Space #Dancing #Together

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.
-- Eve Ensler

#Writing #Character #Play

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

#Believe #Fighting #People

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

#Cancer #Dark #Years

An activist is someone who cannot help but fight for something. That person is not usually motivated by a need for power or money or fame, but in fact is driven slightly mad by some injustice, some cruelty, some unfairness, so much so that he or she is compelled by some internal moral engine to act to make it better.
-- Eve Ensler

#Fighting #Compassion #Mad

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

#Thinking #Different #Boards

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

#Girl #Verbs #Want

For me, so much of my life has been this attempt to find my way back into my body. I tried various forms, from promiscuity, to eating disorders, to performance art. And I think it wasn't until I got cancer, where I was suddenly being pricked and ported and chemoed and operated on, that I suddenly just became body. I was just a body. And it was in that, in that finally landing in myself that I really discovered the world in my body.
-- Eve Ensler

#Art #Cancer #Thinking

Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no when you don’t want to do something. Say yes if your instincts are strong, even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you’re doing here. Believe in kissing.
-- Eve Ensler

#Life #Strong #Stars

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

#Men #Issues #Violence

You know I think so many of us live outside our bodies. My dream is that people will find a way back home, into their bodies, to connect with the earth, to connect with each other, to connect with the poor, to connect with the broken, to connect with the needy, to connect with people calling out all around us, to connect with the beauty, poetry, the wildness.
-- Eve Ensler

#Dream #Home #Thinking

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

#Powerful #Trying #Structure

Naming things, breaking through taboos and denial is the most dangerous, terrifying, and crucial work. This has to happen in spite of political climates or coercions, in spite of careers being won or lost, in spite of the fear of being criticized, outcast, or disliked. I believe freedom begins with naming things. Humanity is preserved by it.
-- Eve Ensler

#Believe #Careers #Political

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

#Art #Believe #Thinking

Looking at it, I started crying. Maybe it was knowing that I had to give up the fantasy, the enormous life consuming fantasy , that someone or something was going to do this for me – the fantasy that someone was coming to lead my life, to choose direction, to give me orgasms.
-- Eve Ensler

#Giving Up #Knowing #Fantasy

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

#Struggle #Thinking #People

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

#Beautiful #Thinking #Self

Writing and giving voice to what I am feeling makes me happy. And supporting people in finding their voice, passion, outrage and resistance. There is nothing better than that.
-- Eve Ensler

#Passion #Writing #Voice

…find freedom, aliveness, and power not from what contains, locates, or protects us, but from what dissolves, reveals, and expands us.
-- Eve Ensler

#Protect

I think one of the problems with the capitalist mainstream is this: no matter what you create to respond or resist it they will buy it.
-- Eve Ensler

#Thinking #Matter #Problem

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

#Powerful #Littles #Way

I think there are so many children being brought up in some form of violence, be it violence of poverty or sexism or racism or homophobia or transphobia. That violence takes a life to transform or overcome. I don't think people should be spending their lives dealing with that. I think people should be thriving, playing, creating, evolving.
-- Eve Ensler

#Children #Thinking #Creating

Unless men are active allies, we'll never end violence against women and girls.
-- Eve Ensler

#Girl #Men #Allies

Dance has a transformative effect on bodily trauma.
-- Eve Ensler

#Trauma

Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back.
-- Eve Ensler

#Far Away #Coming Back #Being Afraid

When we give in the world what we want the most, we heal the broken part inside each of us.
-- Eve Ensler

#Motivation #Inspiration #Broken

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

#Men #Epidemics #Connections

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

#Attention #Fixing #Serving Others

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

#Beautiful #Mean #Boys

The ***** is pure in purpose. It is the only organ in the body designed purely for pleasure.
-- Eve Ensler

#Purpose #Body #Pleasure

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

#Sex #Healing #Math

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

#Order #Broken #Giving

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

#White #Racism #People

When you rape, beat, maim, mutilate, burn, bury, and terrorize women, you destroy the essential life energy on the planet.
-- Eve Ensler

#Energy #Essentials #Beats

Why don't we bring everyone up to be caring and compassionate, to believe that we are connected with everyone and everything around us?
-- Eve Ensler

#Believe #Caring #Compassionate

stop fixing your bodies and start fixing the world!
-- Eve Ensler

#Empowering #World #Body

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

#Distance #Believe #Earth

One of the most radical things women can do is to love their body.
-- Eve Ensler

#Body #Radical

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

#Reality #Thinking #Doors

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

#Stories #Way

It [the memoir "In The Body of the World"] wrote me. I joke about it, but this book was so unusual. It just started to come out. I really feel like it came straight from my body. I think it was both an expression of what I had gone through, but also it just felt like everything had come together in my body and it needed to tell that story.
-- Eve Ensler

#Book #Thinking #Expression

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

#Hard Work #Thinking #Voice

What I believe is that we have this extraordinary spirit inside ourselves, which for me is our Buddha nature. I believe we are in the process of opening and getting closer and closer to our Buddha nature and stripping away all that is covering it. I don't think I'm going to end up meeting this one being up there or out there.
-- Eve Ensler

#Believe #Thinking #Covering

When you bring consciousness to anything, things begin to shift.
-- Eve Ensler

#Consciousness

What I would argue is that real spirituality is the ability to keep encountering two opposite thoughts at the same time and still maintain some kind of morality and perspective in the world. It is not the elimination of one side of the equation or the elimination of what you don't like; it is the investigation of everything.
-- Eve Ensler

#Real #Opposites #Two

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

#Girl #Years #United States

One of the things I think about when we talk about a violence,and relationship to spirituality is that it seems to me when you take something from someone that isn't yours or you hurt someone else, fundamentally, you actually do that to yourself. You actually unmake yourself, you work against your own being and your own matter.
-- Eve Ensler

#Hurt #Thinking #Matter

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

#Economic Inequality #Neoliberalism #Devastation

I think to be honest, that being is inside. I meet that being in so many people that I meet everywhere in the world and when I do meet that being, in other people, what I want to ask is "How do we keep opening ourselves so that we can become as vulnerable and as willing to live in the deepest complexity and ambiguity and truth that we can?"
-- Eve Ensler

#Thinking #People #World

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

#Thinking #People #Greed

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.
-- Eve Ensler

#Writing #Character #Artist

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

#America #Different #Way

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

#Writing #Interesting #Worry