Eve Ensler
My dream is that people will find a way back home, into their bodies, to connect with the earth, to connect with each other, to connect with the poor, to connect with the broken, to connect with the needy, to connect with people calling out all around us, to connect with the beauty, poetry, the wildness.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Sad
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.Collection: Women
I wake up every day and I think, 'I'm breathing! It's a good day.'
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.
I think theatre to some extent is always about telling stories, isn't it, and I think what I've learned is that freedom comes when you tell your story; freedom comes when you tell the truth.
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.
Unless men are active allies, we'll never end violence against women and girls.
Cancer essentially lives in us and becomes activated at some point, and then cells begin to psychotically divide. Initially, the cancer cell looks like other cells and the body invites it in.
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.
I think the world is always improving and always not improving. I think that both are simultaneously happening all the time.
I'm a feminist; I grew up with feminism, but I also think there's a way in which we need to shake things up so that we can push it further and in other directions.
The older you get, the more you are aware that everybody has a certain way of seeing things, which they have to honour.
Dance has a transformative effect on bodily trauma.
I was born in Manhattan and grew up in Scarsdale. Scarsdale didn't work for me as a place at all.
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.
Security isn't what I hunger for. I hunger for change. I hunger for connection.
I think all my work's been about how do women get back into our bodies; how do men get back. We're all disassociated.
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.
I think violence against women in America has become ordinary - it's been made absolutely acceptable.
Why are women immobile? Because so many feel like they're waiting for someone to say, 'You're good, you're pretty, I give you permission.'
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.
Do I think it's great that we have a celebrity system where some people matter and some people don't? No. But do I think we'll always create icons and legends? Yeah, I probably do.
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.
Since cancer, I feel like I have dreams rather than ambitions, visions rather than plans.
I would rate the fact that I get to be alive a big beautiful 10. Satisfaction with myself - work in progress.
I was a waitress for nine years, which I don't regret at all. It taught me about discipline. I was always writing; it took a long time to make a career of it.
Before cancer, I was obviously disconnected. I had a tumor the size of a mango inside me and didn't do anything about it. It wasn't like I didn't know something was wrong.
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.
One of the most radical things women can do is to love their body.
I try not to think about what people think of me. You can't, because then you get hung up in all the people who love you, and you've also got all the people who hate you, because of what you're doing.
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.
I really want to help stop violence toward women.
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.
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.
Theater has an incredible capacity to move people to social change, to address issues, to inspire social revolution.
Whatever culture, whatever country, girls are taught to please others as opposed to pleasing themselves.
I grew up in a tradition where having ideas and contributing to the community and creating art that had an impact on the world mattered. That's part of the Jewish tradition.
Geography does not define you - love does.
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.
For many years now, I feel like my own body struggle has been linked and connected with women I meet in the world. I think we're in this together.
I think I've always had these two currents, equally strong, of wanting to change the world and make the world better and fight injustices and fight violence, and then being an artist, which is a very different strain.
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.
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.Collection: Mother
In America, we have a government that is now run by white nationalists, by billionaires, by incredible misogynists.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Fighting
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Sex
When you rape, beat, maim, mutilate, burn, bury, and terrorize women, you destroy the essential life energy on the planet.Collection: Energy