Top 140 Eve Ensler Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “We must stop being polite and behaved, and find new inventive tactics to shift the paradigm. We are the majority.”

— Eve Ensler

52. “The cancer in me became an awareness of the cancer that is everywhere. The cancer of cruelty, the cancer of carelessness, the cancer of greed.”

— Eve Ensler

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “To love women, to love our vaginas, to know them and touch them and be familiar with who we are and what we need. To satisfy ourselves, to teach our lovers to satisfy us, to be present in our vaginas, to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humor, to make them visible so they cannot be ravaged in the dark without great consequence, so that our center, our point, our motor, our dream, is no longer detached, mutilated, numb, broken, invisible, or ashamed.”

— Eve Ensler

58. “Danger lurks when people are dissociated and detached from their own story or feelings.”

— Eve Ensler

59. “Dance has a transformative effect on bodily trauma.”

— Eve Ensler

60. “Once you are diagnosed with cancer, time changes. It both speeds up insanely and stops altogether.”

— Eve Ensler

61. “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

62. “Cancer was the most terrifying, arduous, painful thing, but it was also a profound gift in the sense that I was holding so much in my body for so many years that was dark and terrifying which was preventing my coming back into myself.”

— Eve Ensler

63. “I think the human species is very suicidal.”

— Eve Ensler

64. “I think what all of us have in common is that we’ve been taught and trained and programmed to focus on fixing and mutilating ourselves. That’s a core reason why women do not have power in the world.”

— Eve Ensler

65. “That we find freedom, aliveness and power not from what contains, locates, or protects us but from what dissolves, reveals and expands us.”

— Eve Ensler

66. “I think to be cut off from your heart is the greatest tyranny in the world.”

— Eve Ensler

67. “I want to read so I can read the Koran read the signs in the street know the number of the bus I’m supposed to take when I one day leave this house.”

— Eve Ensler

68. “Some days I would get so exhausted, nauseous, in pain – just from going back through things. It’s almost as if I had the experience and then the meta-experience.”

— Eve Ensler

69. “I bet you’re worried. I was worried. I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don’t think about them.”

— Eve Ensler

70. “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

71. “I am an emotional I am an emotional, devotional, incandotional creature.”

— Eve Ensler

72. “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

73. “I think what’s been true across the board is the universal patriarchy, the fear of women ever being born back into complete sexuality and life-force. This manifests itself in different cultural variances, but that’s really what’s going on everywhere.”

— Eve Ensler

74. “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

75. “If you are connected to your own internal being, it is very hard to be screwing and destroying and hurting another human being, because you’ll be feeling what they’re feeling. If you’re separated, it’s not a hard thing to do at all.”

— Eve Ensler

76. “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

77. “Saying the word I was not supposed to say is the thing that gave me a voice in the world.”

— Eve Ensler

78. “I think being an activist and an artist is an interesting contradiction, because so often they are at odds with one another. When you write as an artist you have to clean the palate of your own politics in creating characters and activism is kind of the exact opposite.”

— Eve Ensler

79. “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

80. “This may or may not appeal to you – this moving, this nomadic existence, and this nonattached life. I am not suggesting we all leave our relationships and homes and children. Not at all. I am proposing that we reconceive the dream. That we consider what would happen if security were not the point of our existence. That we find freedom, aliveness, and power not from what contains, locates, or protects us but from what dissolves, reveals, and expands us.”

— Eve Ensler

81. “How much self-awareness does a life of privilege and entitlement afford the entitled? If you are birthed into a particular paradigm that serves you, what would compel you to look outside?”

— Eve Ensler

82. “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

83. “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

84. “I’m in good shape. My cancer means I have lost a lot of organs and I’m a lot lighter. I have devoted myself to yoga and I’m doing handstands.”

— Eve Ensler

85. “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

86. “Poor women suffer terrible sexual violence that goes unreported. Because of their social class, these women do not have access to therapy or other methods of healing. Their repeated abuse ultimately eats away at their self-esteem, driving them to drugs, prostitution, AIDS, and in many cases, death.”

— Eve Ensler

87. “Money doesn’t make you special, it makes you lucky. Be generous, be crazy, be outrageous.”

— Eve Ensler

88. “People didn’t feel so much shame around it and that they didn’t feel so much humiliation around it. And the other thing that people have given me a lot of feedback about – something I’m very excited about – is all the stuff around chemo as an “empathetic warrior.””

— Eve Ensler

89. “Women secretly love to talk about their vaginas. They get very excited, mainly because no one has ever asked them before.”

— Eve Ensler

90. “I believe in irony. And if V-Day has taught me anything, it’s that if you go out with artistic, outrageous irony and humor, people are drawn to it.”

— Eve Ensler

91. “Security isn’t what I hunger for. I hunger for change. I hunger for connection.”

— Eve Ensler

92. “There is a global epidemic where one out of three women will be beaten or sexually assaulted in their lifetimes? How are we going to build a future of love and connection? And why would this not be of utmost concern to men?”

— Eve Ensler

93. “Wouldn’t it be incredible if everyone could find the joy that comes with committing to our own goodness? Perhaps we would stop dividing ourselves into malignancies of various forms.” SCAN.”

— Eve Ensler

94. “I live with that contradiction daily. It is a constant struggle. I struggle very deeply. I don’t think I’ve said this to anyone, but I’ve wondered if I just want to give up this world and live in the Congo and just be there. But I don’t think that’s what they need from me.”

— Eve Ensler

95. “I think the world is always improving and always not improving. I think that both are simultaneously happening all the time. I don’t think it’s one motion unfortunately – I wish we could say it’s better, better, better – but I think it’s better, bad, better, bad – you know?”

— Eve Ensler

96. “My commitment originated in my own story and my own relationship to violence.”

— Eve Ensler

97. “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

98. “Between the combination of Judeo-Christian religious ‘be good be good be good’ and Capitalist ‘something’s wrong with you, buy this’ and the parental upbringing, which is ‘you’re wrong, you’re not thin enough, you’re not smart enough’ I mean, hello! We don’t have a shot.”

— Eve Ensler

99. “I’d stop calling it “chemotherapy.” I’d call it “transformational juice.” Infusion suites would become “transformational suites” or “journey rooms.””

— Eve Ensler

100. “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