Marilyn French Quotes & Sayings

Men stumble over pebbles, never over mountains. — Marilyn French

There's no justice, there's only love. — Marilyn French

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

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

She drowned in words that could not teach her how to swim. — Marilyn French

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

Marriage accustomed one to the good things, so one came to take them for granted, but it magnified the bad things, so they came to feel as painful as a grain in one's eye. An open window, a forgotten quart of milk, a TV set left blaring, socks on the bathroom floor could become occasions for incredible rage. — Marilyn French

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

Never underestimate the power of helplessness! — Marilyn French

'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

But we all die, and all death is violent, the overthrowing of the state of life, so why did that year [1968]seem so terrible? Are King or Kennedy or some peasant folk in a village more important than the starved-out of Biafra, the names on the Detroit homicide list? Maybe I'm playing an intellectual game, marking out one year or two on a calendar as special in horror so I can add that they were also special in significance, and thus compensate for the horror, or even redeem it. Humans are fond of finding ways to be grateful for their suffering, calling falls fortunate and deaths resurrection. It's not a bad idea, I guess: since you're going to have the suffering anyway, you might as well be grateful for it. Sometimes, though, I think if we didn't expect the suffering, we wouldn't have so much of it. — Marilyn French

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

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

Pride. You have it where you can have it. — Marilyn French

The view of life as a struggle for power generates a language in which life has no significance and only power matters. — Marilyn French

It's strange how men feel they have the right to criticize a woman's appearance to her face. — Marilyn French

Men seem unable to feel equal to women: they must be superior or they are inferior. — Marilyn French

The words of Pyotr Stephanovich come into my mind: You must love God because He is the only one you can love for Eternity.
That sounds very profound to me, and tears come into my eyes whenever I say it. I never heard anyone else say it. But I don't believe in God and if I did I couldn't love Him/Her/It. I couldn't love anyone I thought had created this world. — Marilyn French

There was no justice, there was only life. And life she had. — Marilyn French

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

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

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

Later, she would remember these years, and realize with astonishment that she had, by fifteen, decided on most of the assumptions she would carry for the rest of her life: that people were essentially not evil, that perfection was death, that life was better than order and a little chaos good for the soul. Most important, this life was all. Unfortunately, she forgot these things, and had to remember them the hard way. — Marilyn French

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

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

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

In the beginning was the Mother, the Word began a new era, one we have come to call Patriarchy. — Marilyn French

Even disasters
there are always disasters when you travel
can be turned into adventures. — Marilyn French

If you ask me what I believe in today, I believe in feminism. I believe that all human beings are equal. I believe that no one has the right to authority over anyone else. Feminism has to do with everything in the world, a vision of how the world can be. I have great doubts about Utopias, but I just keep on thinking there is a better way to live than the way we live now. — Marilyn French

I believe that all human beings are equal. I believe that no one has the right to authority over anyone else. — Marilyn French

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

The very notion of superiority of one kind over another will have to disappear, although differences among kind will remain. — Marilyn French

It isn't success after all, is it, if it isn't an expression of your deepest energies? — Marilyn French

One advantage to being a despised species is that you have freedom, freedom to be any crazy thing you want. If you listen to a group of housewives talk, you'll hear a lot of nonsense, some of it really crazy. This comes, I think, from being alone so much, and pursuing your own odd train of thought without impediment, which some call discipline. The result is craziness, but also brilliance. Ordinary women come out with the damnedest truth. You ignore them at your own risk. And they are permitted to go on making wild statements without being put in one kind of jail or another (some of them, anyway) because everyone knows they're crazy and powerless too. If a woman is religious or earthy, passive or wildly assertive, loving or hating, she doesn't get much more flak than if she isn't: her choices lie between being castigated as a ball and chain or as a whore. — Marilyn French

I've known for a long time that hypocrisy is the secret of sanity. You mustn't let them know you know. — Marilyn French

That's sheer luck too: luck of the draw of birth: century, continent, nation, section, sex, color, socioeconomic sector. — Marilyn French

Oh, God, why don't I remember that a little chaos is good for the soul? — Marilyn French

My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of western civilization, to make it a feminist world. — Marilyn French

Male territorial insanity yields only to another male. What a difference the possession of a penis makes! — Marilyn French

For men to focus on controlling women's reproduction to solve a society's problems seems nothing short of mad or, at best, superstitious. But men's superstition or insanity has real and dire consequences for the women who are its object. And states, too, home in on women's bodies, perhaps to create the illusion that men are in control of uncontrollable forces. Indeed, almost all governments try to control women's bodies and regulate their appearance in some way. — Marilyn French

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water. — Marilyn French

All the women I know feel a little like outlaws. — Marilyn French

My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don't matter. — Marilyn French

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

When a man loses superiority, he loses potency. That's what all this talk about castrating women is about. Castrating women are those who refuse to pretend men are better than they are and better than women are. The simple truth - that men are only equal - can undermine a culture more devastatingly than any bomb. Subversion is telling the truth. — Marilyn French

Our culture believes strong individuals can transcend their circumstances. I myself don't much enjoy books by Hardy or Dreiser or Wharton, where the outside world is so strong, so overwhelming, that the individual hasn't a chance. I get impatient, I keep feeling that somehow the deck is stacked unfairly. That is the point, of course, but my feeling is that if that's true, I don't want to play. I prefer to move to another table where I can retain my illusion, if illusion it be, that I'm working only against only probabilities, and have a chance to win. Then if you lose, you can blame it on your own poor playing. That is called a tragic flaw, and like guilt, it's very comforting. You can go on believing that there really is a right way, and you just didn't find it. — Marilyn French

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

S and M is only the expression in the bedroom of an oppressive-submissive relation which can happen also in the kitchen or at the factory, can happen between people of any gender. There is obviously something titillating about these relationships, but it isn't the sexual components that makes them ugly, they're uglier elsewhere. Nothing sexual is depraved. Only cruelty is depraved, and that's another matter. — Marilyn French

In a way it doesn't matter whether you open doors or close them, you still end up in a box. — Marilyn French

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

All men are rapists and that's all they are — Marilyn French

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

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

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model. — Marilyn French

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

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

What I don't understand is where women suddenly get power. Because they do. The kids, who almost always turn out to be a pile of shit, are, we all know, Mommy's fault. Well, how did she manage that, this powerless creature? Where was all her power during the years she was doing five loads of laundry a week and worrying about mixing the whites with the colors? How was she able to offset Daddy's positive influence? How come she never knows she has this power until afterward, when it gets called responsibility? — Marilyn French

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

It would be hard to get statistics on violent death
what do you count as murder? When people starve to death because of policies of governments and corporations, is that murder? Nature does a fair amount of murdering itself, which is why this whole notion of dominating nature arose: it was one of those things that seemed a good idea at the time. No one ever believes a cure will prove worse than the disease. And maybe it isn't. An invasion of microbes that destroys a body could also be called murder. All deaths are violent deaths, I suppose. — Marilyn French

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

The same men who are blind and deaf to feminism are acutely sensitive to what threatens their dominance and privilege. — Marilyn French

Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape? — Marilyn French

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

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

Not many men have both good fortune and good sense. — Marilyn French

Rain is one thing the British do better than anybody else. — Marilyn French

But she continued to wonder what the fish tasted like, so brilliant and vivid pink. Would it taste pink? — Marilyn French

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

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

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