Ensler Eve 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

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

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

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

So much of life, it seems to me, is the framing and naming of things. I had been so busy creating a future of love that I never identified the life I was living as the life of love, because up until then I had never felt entitled enough or free enough or, honestly, brave enough to embrace my own narrative. Ironically, I had gone ahead and created the life I secretly must have wanted, but it had to be covert and off the record. Chemo was burning away the wrapper and suddenly I was in my version of life. Thus began the ecstasy - the joy, the pure joy of a spiritual pirate who finds the secret treasure. — Eve Ensler

In "securing" people, make them really really afraid. Create all kinds of colors and alerts that terrorize the population. Terror and numbness will eventually be mistaken for security. In "securing" people, take away their opinions and voices and instincts. Make them feel afraid to speak out. Control will eventually be mistaken for security. In "securing" people, distract them through addictive consumption and mindless entertainment programming. Amnesia will eventually be mistaken for security. — Eve Ensler

The people who are on the front lines every day in hospitals, nurses, the people who are running clinics, the people who are taking care of your children, those are the people who are the lovers of the world, are the good of the world. — 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

I came out of the nine-hour surgery and I had tubes in every direction, and those nurses at the Mayo Clinic, I could cry for four days at the kindness of those nurses. The care, the detail of the care, the attention that just never wavered, never complained. The love. — Eve Ensler

Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. — Eve Ensler

I think when people begin to tell their stories, everything changes, because not only are you legitimised in the telling of your story and are you found, literally, like you matter, you exist in the telling of your story, but when you hear your story be told, you suddenly exist in community and with others. — Eve Ensler

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

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

What does your vagina smell like?' ANSWER: 'My husband's face. — Eve Ensler

To speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humour, to make them visible so that can not be ravaged in the dark without great consequence. — 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

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

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

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

Political change and academic change and intellectual change are obviously crucial, but they don't necessarily change society. They can change a particular class and give everybody in that class great arguments, but that doesn't necessarily translate into the body of the culture. — Eve Ensler

Then there was sex, which, for me, was such a need. When I was younger, I had a need to have sex with everyone. I don't know where that was coming from, but there was such a need to connect physically - obviously, for me to connect physically to myself. There were times, like I say in the book, where you lay on top of me, when you push me down, when you're inside me. — Eve Ensler

With the Gulf spill, I absolutely merged in the time when I had that infection. I couldn't get out of the Gulf spill. There were so many similarities: the drains and the siphoning and the tubes. And also in the way the earth was hurt, the ocean was bleeding. Remember the video cams of the oil gushing? I couldn't stop watching that. — Eve Ensler

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

You realized you were surrounded by love, that you were held by love, and that you'd had too small an imagination about that word, that thing. Romantic love, absolutely. Our notion of love - it just seems a very unevolved and very unenlightened notion. That it's this one person who you will meet. Eve Ensler — Krista Tippett

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

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

I think to be cut off from your heart is the greatest tyranny in the world. — Eve Ensler

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

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

Eve Ensler is a hero of mine. She's been working for the rights of women for a long time. — Marcia Wallace

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

Real security is contemplating death, not pretending it doesn't exist. — Eve Ensler

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

I have been struggling to find my way back into my body my whole life. — Eve Ensler

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

If you just look at the fact that a woman was central in twittering the Cairo revolution, and women were central to the Tunisian uprising. Women are at the center of everything right now and moving everything forward. And I do think in the next year or two, we are going to see such a woman spring, such a rising. — Eve Ensler

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

I think the human species is very suicidal. — Eve Ensler

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

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

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

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

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

Stop trying to fix your body. It was never broken. — Eve Ensler

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

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

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

I think that's part of the whole denial and suicidal mechanism [ of the human's race] right "Oh my God, the house is on fire." You sleep through the smoke. — Eve Ensler

We must stop being polite and behaved, and find new inventive tactics to shift the paradigm. We are the majority. — Eve Ensler

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

What I would say to young women is: Pay attention to the real. Pay attention to what you're really thirsting for. What do you really want? And I think that's much harder to decipher in a culture that has no interest in it. What interests me is, are we going to wake in time? Are human beings going to wake up to ourselves, to the incredible poverty that's on this planet, to what we're doing to the earth, to what we're doing to women, to what we're doing to boys? That's what's important. — Eve Ensler

The world has done that already
possessed the Congo and pillaged her and dominated her and robbed her of agency and occupation. Love is something else, something rising and contagious and surprising. It isn't aware of itself. It isn't keeping track. It isn't something you sign for. It's endless and generous and enveloping. It's in the drums, in the voices, in the bodies of the wounded made suddenly whole, by the music, by each other, dancing. — Eve Ensler

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

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

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

But my body was telling its story. I have read a lot of stuff about cancer. I needed this book. I wish I'd had this book when I had cancer. I wanted someone to be talking to me about "fart floors." I wanted somebody telling me what it was like to have a [colostomy] bag. I felt so alone. And if you're a person who's been traumatized [by past abuse], it's so potentially re-traumatizing. You slip right into "oh my god, this is the only person this has happened to before" mentality: "I'm especially bad and I have especially bad cancer ... " — Eve Ensler

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

Slavery is back
but never went away — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think it was a realization of this cancer, an understanding of the broader implications of what cancer is. The greed, the ravaging of lands and seas for profit, the taking of things that don't belong to us; what we've done to the environment in this fast-paced, careless hunger. I think all of that was happening in my body. — Eve Ensler

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

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

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

Freedom, that's the kind of power I'm interested in. When we help each other get free, then it's not about anybody being on top or anybody being on the bottom. It's about being together, in a community. — Eve Ensler

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

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

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

I have been a depressed person most of m life. I was always in the throes of self-hatred. — Eve Ensler

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

The love is all around us. I made a life of love. — Eve Ensler

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

I really want to help stop violence toward women. — Eve Ensler

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

If you are trying to please, how do you take responsibility for your own needs? How do you even know what your own needs are? What do you have to cut off in yourself in order to please others? I think the act of pleasing makes everything murky. We lose track of ourselves. We stop uttering declaratory sentences. We stop directing our lives. We wait to be rescued. We forget what we know. We make everything okay rather than real. — Eve Ensler

It is hard to determine what is most disturbing about this book - the devious and immoral tactics used by leaders and recruiters to get women to join the military, the terrible poverty and personal violence women were escaping that lead them to be vulnerable to such manipulation, the raping and harassing of women soldiers by their superiors and comrades once they got to Iraq, or the untreated homelessness, illnesses and madness that have haunted women since they came home. The Lonely Soldier is an important book, a crucial accounting of the shameful war on women who gave their bodies, lives and souls for their country. — Eve Ensler

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

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

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

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