Top 140 Eve Ensler Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back.”

— Eve Ensler

2. “Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars.”

— Eve Ensler

3. “Theater has an incredible capacity to move people to social change, to address issues, to inspire social revolution.”

— Eve Ensler

4. “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

5. “The clitoris is pure in purpose. It is the only organ in the body designed purely for pleasure.”

— Eve Ensler

6. “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

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7. “Stop trying to fix your body. It was never broken.”

— Eve Ensler

8. “Unless men are active allies, we’ll never end violence against women and girls.”

— Eve Ensler

9. “The love is all around us. I made a life of love.”

— Eve Ensler

10. “One of the most radical things women can do is to love their body.”

— Eve Ensler

11. “I wake up every day and I think, ‘I’m breathing! It’s a good day.’”

— Eve Ensler

12. “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

13. “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

14. “Real security is contemplating death, not pretending it doesn’t exist.”

— Eve Ensler

15. “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

16. “When I wrote ‘The Good Body,’ I turned 40 and suddenly had this stomach. It seemed like the end of the world. Because I didn’t value my body. I was constantly judging it, but I also didn’t live in it.”

— Eve Ensler

17. “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

18. “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

19. “When you bring consciousness to anything, things begin to shift.”

— Eve Ensler

20. “Geography does not define you – love does.”

— Eve Ensler

21. “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

22. “I think that anytime you get clear about what your mission is or what your focus wants to be, things start to come together in your life.”

— Eve Ensler

23. “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

24. “I want to touch you in real time not find you on YouTube, I want to walk next to you in the mountains not friend you on Facebook.”

— Eve Ensler

25. “Security is elusive. It’s impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. People change us. Nothing is secure.”

— Eve Ensler

26. “Women are the primary resource of the planet. They give birth, we come from them. They are mothers, they are visionaries, they are the future. If we can figure out how to make women feel safe and honor women, it would be parallel or equal to honoring life itself.”

— Eve Ensler

27. “The only point of having power it seems to me is to empower others. The only point of leadership is to inspire.”

— Eve Ensler

28. “Lasting social and cultural change is spread by ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”

— Eve Ensler

29. “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

30. “People are more afraid to love than they are to kill.”

— Eve Ensler

31. “What happens when someone throws you against a wall or tells you you’re a jackass or puts you down or calls you bad names? It goes into your body. We hold it in our body. If we don’t have a way to let that go and release that, it becomes sickness eventually.”

— Eve Ensler

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “I think we have made progress. There’s no doubt about it, we have moved forward. But there’s some essential, core thing that has not been deconstructed. And I’m telling you, it’s connected to the body. I know it is.”

— Eve Ensler

36. “When we give in the world what we want the most, we heal the broken part inside each of us.”

— Eve Ensler

37. “If you are divided from your body, then you are divided from the body of the world.”

— Eve Ensler

38. “If the theatre has taught me anything, it’s that when things change in the body, in the body politic, in the body of the world, in the body of the earth, in the body of the person, there’s change. You never go back.”

— Eve Ensler

39. “I am so grateful to be alive. It’s ridiculous to be alive.”

— Eve Ensler

40. “The mechanism of violence is what destroys women, controls women, diminishes women and keeps women in their so-called place.”

— Eve Ensler

41. “Dance is holy, sexual, and it’s a way of being very powerful and a little dangerous without being violent.”

— Eve Ensler

42. “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

43. “Denial is really death. People think that when you’re connected with other people it’s more painful. The opposite is true. When you’re connected to the river you have despair, but you also have joy, and there’s a flow in the river.”

— Eve Ensler

44. “I’m a nomad. I have a place in New York in the Flatiron District, and I have a place in Paris in Ile Saint-Louis, and I spend a lot of time in Congo.”

— Eve Ensler

45. “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

46. “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

47. “I have always been obsessed with naming things. If I could name them, I could know them. If I could name them, I could tame them. They could be my friends.”

— Eve Ensler

48. “I think we have to get bolder. Why after Fukushima didn’t we all go out and shut down all the nuclear power plants and stay there until it happened?”

— Eve Ensler

49. “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

50. “It will move through you and you will touch joy and suddenly realize you have never felt joy because it requires abandon. It grows from gratitude and cannot exist where there is mad cynicism or distrust. You will touch this joy and you will suddenly know it is what you were looking for your whole life, but you were afraid to even acknowledge the absence because the hunger for it was so encompassing.”

— Eve Ensler