Top 40 Joanna Russ Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women.”

— Joanna Russ

2. “To die on a dying Earth – I’d live, if only to weep.”

— Joanna Russ

3. “Ignorance is not bad faith. But persistence in ignorance is.”

— Joanna Russ

4. “I’m not a girl. I’m a genius.”

— Joanna Russ

5. “I think we ought to decide that man-hating is not only respectable but honorable. To be a misandrist a woman needs considerable ingenuity, originality, and resilience. A misogynist requires no such resources.”

— Joanna Russ

6. “As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frog in jest. But the frogs die in earnest.”

— Joanna Russ

7. “I once asked a young dissertation writer whether her suddenly grayed hair was due to ill health or personal tragedy; she answered: “It was the footnotes”.”

— Joanna Russ

8. “The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That’s the trouble with women, too.”

— Joanna Russ

9. “Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur.”

— Joanna Russ

10. “Art is collective. Always, it has a tradition behind it.”

— Joanna Russ

11. “How withered away one can be from a life of unremitting toil.”

— Joanna Russ

12. “I didn’t and don’t want to be a ‘feminine’ version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version of the heroes I admire. I want to be the heroes themselves.”

— Joanna Russ

13. “Privileged groups, like everyone else, want to think well of themselves and to believe that they are acting generously and justly.”

— Joanna Russ

14. “The demon got up. The demon said Fool. To think you can eat their food and not talk to them. To think you can take their money and not be afraid of them. To think you can depend on their company and not suffer from them.”

— Joanna Russ

15. “Sit a man on his ass with nothing to do but eat and the first thing that goes is his mind. It never fails.”

— Joanna Russ

16. “There are more whooping cranes in the United States of America than there are women in Congress.”

— Joanna Russ

17. “To act in a way both sexist and racist, to maintain one’s class privilege, it is only necessary to act in the customary, ordinary, usual, even polite manner.”

— Joanna Russ

18. “When the memory of one’s predecessors is buried, the assumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time. And if no one ever did it beforewhy do we think we can succeed now?”

— Joanna Russ

19. “When one culture has the big guns and the other has none, there is a certain predictablity about the outcome.”

— Joanna Russ

20. “Real artists, it seems to me, are those who don’t repeat themselves.”

— Joanna Russ

21. “Then he said, leaning forward: ‘You’re strange animals, you women intellectuals. Tell me: what’s it like to be a woman?’ I took my rifle from behind my chair and shot him dead. ‘It’s like that,’ I said.”

— Joanna Russ

22. “If you want me to do something else useful, you had better show me what that something else is.”

— Joanna Russ

23. “I think from now on, I will not trust anyone who isn’t angry.”

— Joanna Russ

24. “The reply to this was that Three took out a small revolver, and this surprised me; for everyone knows that anger is most intense towards those you know: it is lovers and neighbors who kill each other. There’s no sense, after all, in behaving that way toward a perfect stranger; where’s the satisfaction? No love, no need; no need, no frustration; no frustration, no hate, right? It must have been fear.”

— Joanna Russ

25. “If you want to live forever you are dreadfully dangerous because you’re not living now.”

— Joanna Russ

26. “Somewhere there is a book that says you ought to cry buckets of tears over yourself and love yourself with a passion and wrap your arms around yourself; only then will you be happy and free. That’s a good book.”

— Joanna Russ

27. “In my sleep I had a dream and this dream was a dream of guilt. It was not human guilt but the kind of helpless, hopeless despair that would be felt by a small wooden box or geometrical cube if such objects had consciousness; it was the guilt of sheer existence.”

— Joanna Russ

28. “Life has to end. What a pity! Sometimes, when one is alone, the universe presses itself into one’s hands: a plethora of joy, an organized plentitude.”

— Joanna Russ

29. “An as-yet-unpublished poet in Boulder, Colorado, once said to me that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. I may seem, in the foregoing sketchy pages, to have followed her advice rather too well.”

— Joanna Russ

30. “This is until you’re forty-five, ladies, after which you vanish into thin air like the smile of the Cheshire cat leaving behind only a disgusting grossness and a subtle poison that automatically infects every man under twenty-one.”

— Joanna Russ

31. “At twenty-nine you can’t waste your time reading.”

— Joanna Russ

32. “I have had my share of trouble and sickness but always somewhere in me there is a little spot of warmth and joy to make it all easier, like a traveler’s fire burning out in the wilderness on a cold night.”

— Joanna Russ

33. “I think it no accident that the myth of the isolated achievement so often promotes women writers’ less good work as their best work.”

— Joanna Russ

34. “I cannot get into this swamp or I will never get out; and if I start crying again I’ll remember that I have no one to love, and if anyone treats me like that again, I’ll kill him. Only I mustn’t because they’ll punish me.”

— Joanna Russ

35. “Without meaningful work you might as well be dead.”

— Joanna Russ

36. “I often wonder why women have careers,′ said Shredded Napkin suddenly, showing his teeth. I don’t think he can possibly be saying what I think he’s saying. He isn’t, of course. Never mind. I’ll stand this because Reality is dishing it out and I suppose I ought to learn to adjust to it. Besides, he may be sincere. There is a human being in there. At least he isn’t telling me about something he read in the paper on women’s liberation and then laughing at it.”

— Joanna Russ

37. “For years I have been saying Let me in, Love me, Approve me, Define me, Regulate me, Validate me, Support me. Now I say Move over.”

— Joanna Russ

38. “In my opinion, questions that are based on something real ought to be settled by something real without all this damned lazy miserable drifting.”

— Joanna Russ

39. “They validate perceptions that need validating, especially in adolescence – ie, under the bland, forced optimism of American life terrible forces are at work, things are not what they seem, and if you feel lonely, persecuted, a misfit, and in terror, you aren’t crazy. You’re right.”

— Joanna Russ

40. “How am I to put this together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition?”

— Joanna Russ

41. “Thus in the bad days, in the dark swampy times.”

— Joanna Russ

42. “If Earth had been hit by plague, by fire, by war, by radiation, sterility, a thousand things, you name it, I’d still stand by her; I love her; I would fight every inch of the way there because my whole life is knit to her. And she’d need mourners. To die on a dying Earth- I’d live, if only to weep.”

— Joanna Russ

43. “What I learned late in life, under my rain of lava, under my kill-or-cure, unhappily, slowly, stubbornly, barely, and in really dreadful pain, was that there is one and only one way to possess that in which we are defective, therefore that which we need, therefore that which we want. Become it.”

— Joanna Russ