Best Eve Ensler Quotes & Sayings

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

I think of the security of cages. How violence, cruelty, oppression, become a kind of home, a familiar pattern, a cage, in which we know how to operate and define ourselves ... — Eve Ensler

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

Geography does not define you - love does. — Eve Ensler

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

I really do think how we frame things determines so much of our experience, and I've been talking to a lot of oncologists, like, why don't we call them transformation suites and give people transformation juice and have guides that support people when they're going through chemo so you could actually burn away what needs to be burned away, as opposed to this dread, terror, horror, which is a very different experience. — Eve Ensler

Well, the tyranny of masculinity and the tyranny of patriarchy I think has been much more deadly to men than it has to women. It hasn't killed our hearts. It's killed men's hearts. It's silenced them; it's cut them off. — Eve Ensler

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

Whatever culture, whatever country, girls are taught to please others as opposed to pleasing themselves. — Eve Ensler

Each time I had five hours of the poison going into me, I just pictured everything that needed to be burned away. I pictured wars, I pictured the things my father had done to me, I pictured brutality, and when it was over, I am light. — Eve Ensler

We have not yet made violence against women abnormal, extraordinary, unacceptable. We have not yet come to see it as a pathological issue. — Eve Ensler

I really believe that is helping people. I've been talking to oncologists about how we can re-frame and re-think the chemo process, so it becomes a much more spiritual, psychological journey. Where people really could burn away what needs to be burned away. It's happening anyway. Why not frame it in a psychological way where it can serve as a transformation? — Eve Ensler

I began to see my body like an iPad or a car. I would drive it and demand things from it. It had no limits. It was invincible. It was to be conquered and mastered like the Earth herself. — Eve Ensler

Do you say that tree isn't pretty cause it doesn't look like that tree? We're all trees. You're a tree. I'm a tree. You've got to love your body, Eve. You've got to love your tree. Love your tree. (Leah) — Eve Ensler

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

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

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

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

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

Stop fixing your bodies and start fixing the world! — Eve Ensler

It's a weird thing about the truth: It protects you. What really makes you vulnerable is when you're lying because you're going to get caught. When you tell the truth, there's a strange relief that comes. — Eve Ensler

I am an emotional I am an emotional, devotional, incandotional creature. — Eve Ensler

Slavery is back
but never went away — Eve Ensler

AND I WENT TO THE LIBRARY, I'M SNEAKING IN THE LIBRARY,
LOOKING THROUGH THE BOOKS, AND YOU KNOW,
LIKE I'M COVERING THE BOOK WITH LIKE SOMETHING ELSE.
AND THEN IT'S LIKE,
"ADMIRE IT, IT'S A BEAUTIFUL FLOWER,
YOU KNOW, IT'S LIKE ROSES."
. I'M LIKE, WE'R E NOT LOOKING AT THE SAME THING
I TOOK PHOTOS OF IT. — Eve Ensler

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

A mother's body against a child's body makes a place. It says you are here. Without this body against your body there is no place. I envy people who miss their mother. Or miss a place or know something called home. The absence of a body against my body created a gap, a hole, a hunger. This hunger determined my life ... The absence of a body against my body made attachment abstract. Made my own body dislocated and unable to rest or settle. A body pressed against your body is the beginning of nest. I grew up not in a home but in a kind of free fall of anger and violence that led to a life of constant movement, of leaving and falling. It is why at one point I couldn't stop drinking and fucking. Why I needed people to touch me all the time. It had less to do with sex than location. When you press against me, or put yourself inside me. When you hold me down or lift me up, when you lie on top of me and I can feel your weight, I exist. I am here. — Eve Ensler

You have visits, then you have disappearances. You enter, then you exit. You come, you go. It would be so great if you could just get to human enlightenment on a linear path. — Eve Ensler

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

The heart is capable of sacrifice. So is the vagina. The heart is able to forgive and repair. It can change it's shape to let us in. It can expand to let us out. So can the vagina. It can ache for us and stretch for us, die for us and bleed and bleed us into this difficult, wondrous world. So can the vagina. I was there in the room. I remeber. — Eve Ensler

For the most part, political correctness doesn't exist here.
- Toby, Marymount Manhattan College — Eve Ensler

Everything you deny is actually killing you on some level. You see something, you feel something wrong with your body, you pretend it's not happening, it goes on, it grows, it gets worse. — Eve Ensler

My vagina's angry. It is. It's pissed off. My vagina's furious and it needs to talk. It needs to talk about all
this shit. It needs to talk to you. I mean what's the deal - an army of people out there thinking up ways to
torture my poor-ass, gentle, loving vagina. Spending their days constructing psycho products, and nasty
ideas to undermine my pussy. Vagina Motherfuckers.
All this shit they're constantly trying to shove up us, clean us up - stuff us up, make it go away. Well, my
vagina's not going away. It's pissed off and it's staying right here. Like tampons - what the hell is that? — Eve Ensler