Jessa Crispin Quotes & Sayings

We don't do well with infinity and endless possibility, and so we break things down into individual units and into stories. And then we accidentally believe in those stories, and we accidentally start acting them out. Stories about what love is, what happiness is. What men are, what women are. Unable to shape our own stories about the madness that surrounds us, we get infected with other people's stories, trying to ignore the discomfort that comes with an imperfect fit. — Jessa Crispin

I was twenty-one when I was hired by Planned Parenthood. It was my first work experience outside of either temping or working for my father at his store. — Jessa Crispin

Men exist on the planet. We have to deal with them at some point. — Jessa Crispin

Reclamation is hard work. Finding the value in your group's characteristics means always having to confront the darkness in those characteristics. For example, it is acceptable, and productive, to think of America as a great nation. It has many great characteristics, from the freedom it grants its citizens to the cultural contributions it has fostered and rewarded. But by unearthing America's good qualities, you will also find its destructive qualities. The way it has interfered internationally and created death and misery for countless citizens of other nations, its history of genocide and slavery, and so on. It is possible to know America's destructive power and still think it is a great nation. But some prefer not to look at all, so as to avoid the cognitive dissonance. It — Jessa Crispin

But here's a little secret: man cannot live on rationality alone. — Jessa Crispin

I don't think that if I had spent the time that I was in, say, Belgrade, writing about my time in Trieste, which is where I had just been, that would have been productive. I told myself: take extensive notes while you're there, do the research part of it, and then pray, pray, the muses will be available when the actual 'ready' happens. — Jessa Crispin

I understand maybe some people are more impressionable than my hard, cynical self, but maybe they need to figure out how to be less of that. — Jessa Crispin

Nora Barnacle is not a very interesting person." So said Richard Ellmann, author of the definitive James Joyce biography, to Brenda Maddox, author of the only Nora Barnacle biography, who quoted him to me. — Jessa Crispin

I don't behave the way people necessarily want me to, but I tried behaving that other way for a short period of time and it didn't take. — Jessa Crispin

according to a brief perusal of women writer's comments online over the past few days, men are: overly confident, predatory, helpless, psychopaths, terrified of women, fascists, the reason why the world is in this mess, literally so stupid, and the problem here. Of course what these women really mean is that they themselves are not overly confident, not predatory, not helpless, and on down the line. It's just easier to say that men are these things, than that you are not these things. People would rightly become suspicious if you suddenly started going on about how amazing you were. They'd start looking for proof you weren't. But by attributing these negative behaviors and traits to your "opposite" group, it's an easy, criticism-proof way of saying, "I would never behave like this, I would never be like this." And — Jessa Crispin

There's this resistance to actually talking to people who are smarter than you about things and I don't know why that is. — Jessa Crispin

Talk to people who know more than you. I feel like we're in this stupid sea of opinion, like "My opinion is valid because it's mine and I have it." — Jessa Crispin

Take childcare for example, an issue that never gets much support beyond lip service in the feminist world, despite it being something that would benefit the majority of women. Once you reach a certain income level, it's easier and more convenient for you to take care of your own childcare needs than to pay the taxes or contribute to a system that would help all women. If your child is in a failing school, it's much more convenient to place your child in a private or charter school than to organize ways to improve the situation for the entire community. This also applies to expanding social welfare programs, supporting community clinics, and so on. As a woman's ability to take care of herself expands thanks to feminist efforts, the feminist goals she's willing to really fight for, or contribute time and money and effort to, shrink. — Jessa Crispin

To feel safe, you need to control what the people around you are going to say and do. This is not achieved by going after the root causes of violence. This is not even achieved by working to slowly improve social conditions. It is achieved through silence and disappearance, by moving the offending object or person out of sight. . . . [However] [d]o we want to live in a world that is safe? Do we want to push the homeless out of our cities and call that a victory over poverty? . . . Or do we want to do the very hard work of recognizing and addressing the actual causes of harm to women? Safety is a short-term goal and it is unsustainable. Eventually, the unaddressed causes will find new ways of manifesting themselves as problems. Pull up the dandelions all you want, but unless you dig up that whole goddamn root it's just going to keep showing back up. — Jessa Crispin

I don't think you can write an experience as you're having it without being an idiot. — Jessa Crispin

Most of what I do is for creative people - writers and painters and photographers - trying to work through creative problems. — Jessa Crispin

It's about passion, about allowing yourself to be overwhelmed, allowing a love to be feral without needing to domesticate it. Loving something or someone for what or who it is, not what you want it to be. That takes an enormous amount of strength and integrity. Which ties back in with the calling: allowing something to be scary, to be overwhelming; to devote yourself to it even if it requires great changes from you. It's something we have to live up to; it does not arrive neatly wrapped up in an understandable package. That would be easy. And the Lovers is always hard. RECOMMENDED — Jessa Crispin

I would never tell anybody to get a divorce. — Jessa Crispin

This is the way dissent is handled in feminist realms: a contrary opinion or argument is actually an attack. This stems from the belief that your truth is the only truth, that your sense of trauma and oppression does not need to be examined or questioned. In — Jessa Crispin

American culture never necessarily made sense to me, but they should warn you: leaving comes with a huge sense of alienation that never goes away. — Jessa Crispin

I don't think that I can be settled and I don't think that I would ever want to be. — Jessa Crispin

I believe in free will. — Jessa Crispin

It's a favorite myth in our culture that hardship makes you a better person, that is is merely the grindstone on which your essence is refined and polished. But the truth is that scarcity, depression, thwarted ambition, and suffering most often leave the person a little twisted. That is the territory where mean drunks and tyrannical bastards come from. — Jessa Crispin

I like European and South American literature, but mostly I read nonfiction. — Jessa Crispin

My belief that the publishing industry is run by prigs and cowards dates back to many years before I even had the idea for the book. — Jessa Crispin

We are not slaves to unconscious drives unless we insist on believing that the subconscious is weaker or less important or dumber than our logical skills, if we neglect it and don't dive in. The important task is to understand and modify the stories that are holding sway. You can't bully the prerational with the rational. You need to communicate with it on its level: myth, ritual, symbol, metaphor. — Jessa Crispin

Somehow I have slipped. I have to sleep with my computer right by the bed just in case I wake up and start having thoughts. My thoughts need constant interruption, as the stickiness of it will never work, things will never get better, all is lost, the sea wants to have a conversation with you - it all traps me in the same place. I have television, blogs, social media all queued up to keep me from having thoughts. — Jessa Crispin

It is always easier to find your sense of value by demeaning another's value. It is easier to define yourself as 'not that,' rather than do an actual accounting of your own qualities and put them on the scale. — Jessa Crispin

If there ever were one moment where everything worked for us, where we lived in harmony and at ease with our natures, then we would still be there. There is no garden to return to, no idyllic perfect childhood, no enwombed state. The Garden of Eden was boring, childhood is a nightmare we should all be grateful to be done with, and your mother smoked while she was pregnant and poisoned you in the womb with artificial sugar substitutes. The best thing any of us can do is just to keep fucking up in a forward motion, and see what comes out of it. — Jessa Crispin

I don't tell clients what to do. I don't even really tell them what the future is. — Jessa Crispin

Do you know that maxim "Write what you know"? Nonsense. That saying lets us off the hook for our more narcissistic impulses and for not trying to understand the world around us. The more a person learns - and this does not mean you need to get a PhD before you can work, merely that you nurture your curiosity and imagination - the more nuanced and complex his or her work becomes. Think — Jessa Crispin

I have a really good life and I really like it. — Jessa Crispin

Women still get angry at me. I mean, men go after me sometimes, but most of the bad responses come from women. — Jessa Crispin

I never asked anybody to take me seriously. — Jessa Crispin

Radical change is scary. It's terrifying, actually. And the feminism I support is a full-on revolution. Where women are not simply
allowed
to participate in the world as it already exists - an inherently corrupt world, designed by a patriarchy to subjugate and control and destroy all challengers - but are actively able to re-shapeit. Where women do not simply knock on the doors of churches, of governments, of capitalist marketplaces and politely ask for admittance, but create their own religious systems, governments, and economies. My feminism is not one of incremental change, revealed in the end to be The Same As Ever, But More So. It is a cleansing fire. — Jessa Crispin

You don't have to go to New York and you don't have to go to LA or London. Go somewhere cheap. Go somewhere with free art museums and then just go to art museums. — Jessa Crispin

I have yet to get sued. My father thinks I should get liability insurance. — Jessa Crispin

I would slay myself on the altar of boredom if given the chance. — Jessa Crispin

I think American literature is in a tedious place, horrible place. I can't even engage with it. — Jessa Crispin

I knew my motivations for going to each place and what I was looking for. If I don't do that then I generally don't write about my travels. — Jessa Crispin

Once you leave, you're no longer of that country, but you are never actually of the country that you go to, and if you go back, you're not anywhere. You never belong to anything. — Jessa Crispin

When we talk about women's safety as being the top priority, what we are talking about is separating women out from society, not creating space for them within society. We are talking about creating methods of control and manipulation. We are saying that the world needs to be reorganized not around fairness and peace, but around our particular needs and desires. If we continue to define our group's identity by what has been done to us, we will continue to be object rather than subject. Once — Jessa Crispin

Feminism now seems to be defined as success is defined: as being as good at capitalism as men are. I feel very estranged from it. — Jessa Crispin

A wild appreciation of men and women ... who passionately and fearlessly and recklessly redefine romance ... The passionate creatures who refuse to play it safe and settle down now have an intelligent, like-minded advocate. — Jessa Crispin

Maybe the trick is not to define yourself as a container for your experiences, your thoughts. Maybe it's to assume you are larger than the things you have felt over a series of years, that your history is not a list of things your body has done or been present for, that your family is not people who you spent a lot of time around as a child or carry your genetic code. Maybe the trick is to push violently at your own boundaries, to find your own contradictions, and use your teeth and nails to destroy what separates you from something else.

I am trying. — Jessa Crispin

Go to a place and just send out emails. That's my entire life. I go to countries and I ask, "Who would I know who lives here?" Not even do I know, but who exists and is on the planet. — Jessa Crispin

Women have participated in almost every fight for freedom. They were there when civilians were targeted they were there when the bombs were planted. To argue they didn't have enough power to speak up or they had been brainwashed by their male colleagues is to try to disassociate from the darkness that resides in everyone. And to disassociate from your darkness is to lose your power over it. — Jessa Crispin

I wish other people would write about loneliness more. It's hard to remember that it's not personal. We live in a world that is built to make people lonely ... It's difficult to remember that your loneliness is not really about you and everyone has it. — Jessa Crispin

Just send the emails and talk to people. Spend all your money on nail polish and opera tickets. — Jessa Crispin

We have to imagine something before we can build the infrastructure that will allow it to exist. We have failed here on both fronts: in imagination and in reality. Our great weirdos, from Emily Dickinson to Simone Weil to Coco Chanel, are seen as outliers, as not relevant to the way we think through what we want out of life. It's the same way we discuss radical feminist writers like Dworkin and Firestone. Dworkin is unhinged, Firestone is too eccentric to be taken seriously. — Jessa Crispin

I mean, many times your creative problem is accidentally your personal problem, but it's not quite the same. — Jessa Crispin