V (formerly Eve Ensler) > Quotes

“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 finally know the difference between pleasing and loving, obeying and respecting. It has taken me so many years to be okay with being different, and with being this alive, this intense. (xxvi)”
― Eve Ensler, I Am an Emotional Creature

“Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back.”
― Eve Ensler, I Am an Emotional Creature

“When you rape, beat, maim, mutilate, burn, bury, and terrorize women, you destroy the essential life energy on the planet.”
― Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues

“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, The Vagina Monologues

“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

“You have to give to the world the thing that you want the most, in order to fix the broken parts inside you.”
― Eve Ensler

“The clitoris is pure in purpose. It is the only organ in the body designed purely for pleasure.”
― Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues

“…find freedom, aliveness, and power not from what contains, locates, or protects us, but from what dissolves, reveals, and expands us.
”
― Eve Ensler, Insecure at Last

“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, The Vagina Monologues

“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, I Am an Emotional Creature

“When you bring consciousness to anything, things begin to shift.”
― 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 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, Insecure at Last

“stop fixing your bodies and start fixing the world!”
― Eve Ensler

“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, The Vagina Monologues

“Danger lurks when people are dissociated and detached from their own story or feelings.”
― Eve Ensler, Insecure at Last

“I was always reaching for love, but it turns out love doesn't involve reaching. I was always dreaming of the big love, the ultimate love, the love that would sweep me off my feet or 'break open the hard shell of my lesser self' (Daisaku Ikeda). The love that would bring on my surrender. The love that would inspire me to give everything. As I lay there, it occurred to me that while I had been dreaming of this big love, this ultimate love, I had, without realizing it, been giving and receiving love for most of my life. As with the trees that were right in front of me, I had been unable to value what sustained me, fed me, and gave me pleasure. And as with the trees, I was so busy waiting for and imagining and reaching and dreaming and preparing for this huge big love that I had totally missed the beauty and perfection of the soft-boiled eggs and Bolivian quinoa.”
― Eve Ensler, In the Body of the World

“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, I Am an Emotional Creature

“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, The Good Body

“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

“...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, The Vagina Monologues

“In the United States, the last recorded clitoridectomy for curing masturbation was performed in 1948--on a five year old girl.”
― Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues

“I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas-- a community, a culture of vaginas. There's so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them-- like the Bermunda Triangle.”
― Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues

“Wanting to fall in love and being totally unable to trust, hungering for connection and always finding it claustrophobic.”
― Eve Ensler, In the Body of the World

“There is just so much excess in terms of the market for self-remodeling. I think most women are perfectly gorgeous and beautiful the way they are,”
― Eve Ensler

“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, Insecure at Last

“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, The Vagina Monologues

“What if, instead of being afraid of even talking about death, we saw our lives in some ways as preparation for it.
What if we were taught to ponder it and reflect on it and talk about it and enter it and rehearse it and try it on?What if, rather than being cast out and defined by some terminal category, you were identified as someone in the middle of a transformation that could deepen your soul, open your heart, and all the while-even if and particularly when you were dying-you would be supported by and be part of a community?”
― Eve Ensler, In the Body of the World

“It's a totally ridiculous, completely unsexy word. If you use it during sex, trying to be politically correct-- "Darling, could you stroke my vagina?"-- you kill the act right there. I'm worried about vaginas, what we call them and don't call them.”
― Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues