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Joanna Russ Quotes | Quotes said by Joanna Russ

  • Joanna Russ Quote #1

    (Ezekial saw the wheel
    (Way up in the middle of the air --
    (O Ezekial saw the wheel
    (Way in the middle of the air!

    (Now the big wheel runs by faith
    (And the little wheel runs by the grace of God --

    (The above made up by professional hope experts, you might say, because willful, voluntary, intentional hope was the only kind they had in anything like long supply. Faith is not, contrary to the usual ideas, something that turns out to be right or wrong, like a gambler's bet; it's an act, an intention, a project, something that makes you, in leaping into the future, go so far, far, far ahead that you shoot clean out of Time and right into Eternity, which is not the end of time or a whole lot of time or unending time, but timelessness, that old Eternal Now. So that you end up living not in the future ((in your intentional act of faith)) but in the present. After all.

    (Courage is willful hope.)


  • Joanna Russ Quote #2

    (Only God can make a tree and She seldom tries, nowadays.)

  • Joanna Russ Quote #3

    An as-yet-unpublished poet in Boulder, Colorado, once said to me that anything worth doing was worth doing badly.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 Quote #4

    And here, of course, we come to the one occupation of a female protagonist in literature, the one thing she can do, and by God she does it and does it and does it, over and over and over again.
    She is the protagonist of a Love Story.

  • Joanna Russ Quote #5

    And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).

  • Joanna Russ Quote #6

    At the level of high culture with which this book is concerned, active bigotry is probably fairly rare. It is also hardly ever necessary, since the social context is so far from neutral. 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 Quote #7

    Courage is willful hope.

  • Joanna Russ Quote #8

    Finding The Man. Keeping The Man. Not scaring The Man, building up The Man, following The Man, soothing The Man, flattering The Man, deferring to The Man, changing your judgement for The Man, changing your decisions for The Man, polishing floors for The Man, being perpetually conscious of your appearance for The Man, being romantic for The Man, hinting to The Man, losing yourself in The Man. 'I never had a thought that wasn't yours.' Sob, sob. Whenever I act like a human being, they say, 'What are you getting upset about?' They say: of course you'll get married. They say: of course you're brilliant. They say: of course you'll get a PhD and then sacrifice it to have babies. They say: if you don't, you're the one who'll have two jobs and you can make a go of it if you're exceptional, which very few women are, and if you find a very understanding man. As long as you don't make more money than he does. How do they expect me to live all this junk?

  • Joanna Russ Quote #9

    I left her wallpapering her much-loved, much-tended little corner of hell.

  • Joanna Russ Quote #10

    I think, said my neighbour, her chin very high in the air (and still spiffed, I am glad to say) that women who've never married and never had children have missed out on the central experiences of life. They are emotionally crippled.

    Now what am I supposed to say to that? I ask you. That women who've never won the Nobel Peace Prize have also experienced a serious deprivation? It's like taking candy from a baby; the poor thing isn't allowed to get angry, only catty. I said, That's rude, and silly, and helped her to mashed potatoes.

    ....You can't catch a man.

    That's why I'll never be abandoned, said I. Fortunately she did not hear me. Did I say taking candy from babies? Rather, eating babies, killing babies, abandoning babies. So sad, so easy.

  • Joanna Russ Quote #11

    Ignorance is not bad faith. But persistence in ignorance is.

  • Joanna Russ Quote #12

    In college, educated women (I found out) were frigid; active women (I knew) were neurotic; women (we all knew) were timid, incapable, dependent, nurturing, passive, intuitive, emotional, unintelligent, obedient, and beautiful. You can always get dressed up and go to a party. Woman is the gateway to another world; Woman is the earth-mother; Woman is the eternal siren; Woman is purity; Woman is carnality; Woman has intuition; Woman is the life-force; Woman is selfless love.

    I am the gateway to another world, (said I, looking in the mirror) I am the earth-mother; I am the eternal siren; I am purity, (Jeez, new pimples) I am carnality; I have intuition; I am the life-force; I am selfless love. (Somehow it sounds different in the first person, doesn't it?)

    Honey (said the mirror, scandalised) Are you out of your fucking mind?
    I AM HONEY
    I AM RASPBERRY JAM
    I AM A VERY GOOD LAY
    I AM A GOOD DATE
    I AM A GOOD WIFE
    I AM GOING CRAZY
    Everything was peaches and cream.

  • Joanna Russ Quote #13

    Leaning her silly, beautiful, drunken head on my shoulder, she said, Oh, Esther, I don't want to be a feminist. I don't enjoy it. It's no fun.

    I know, I said. I don't either. People think you decide to be a radical, for God's sake, like deciding to be a librarian or a ship's chandler. You make up your mind, you commit yourself (sounds like a mental hospital, doesn't it?).

    I said Don't worry, we could be buried together and have engraved on our tombstone the awful truth, which some day somebody will understand:

    WE WUZ PUSHED.

  • Joanna Russ Quote #14

    Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.

  • Joanna Russ Quote #15

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

  • Joanna Russ Quote #16

    Now in my eleven years of conventional life I had learned many things and one of them is what it means to be convicted of rape--I do not mean the man who did it, I mean the woman to whom it was done. Rape is one of the Christian mysteries, it creates a luminous and beautiful tableau in people's minds; and as I listened furtively to what nobody would allow me to hear straight out, I slowly came to understand that I was face to face with one of those feminine disasters, like pregnancy, like disease, like weakness; she was not only the victim of the act but in some strange way its perpetrator; somehow she had attracted the lightening that struck her out of a clear sky. A diabolical chance--which was not chance--had revealed her to all of us as she truly was, in her secret inadequacy, in that wretched guiltiness which she had kept hidden for seventeen years but which now finally manifested in front of everybody. Her secret guilt was this:
    She was Cunt.
    She had lost something.
    Now the other party to the incident had manifested his essential nature, too; he was Prick--but being Prick is not a bad thing. In fact, he had gotten away with something (possibly what she had lost).
    And there I was at eleven years of age:
    She was out late at night.
    She was in the wrong part of town.
    Her skirt was too short and that provoked him.
    She liked having her eye blacked and her head banged against the sidewalk.
    I understood this perfectly. (I reflected thus in my dream, in my state of being a pair of eyes in a small wooden box stuck forever on a grey, geometric plane--or so I thought.) I too had been guilty of what had been done to me, when I came home from the playground in tears because I had been beaten up by bigger children who were bullies.
    I was dirty.
    I was crying.
    I demanded comfort.
    I was being inconvenient.
    I did not disappear into thin air.

  • Joanna Russ Quote #17

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

  • Joanna Russ Quote #18

    That not all men are piggy, only some; that not all men belittle me, only some; that not all men get mad if you won’t let them play Chivalry, only some; that not all men write books in which women are idiots, only most; that not all men pull rank on me, only some; that not all men pinch their secretaries’ asses, only some; that not all men make obscene remarks to me in the street, only some; that not all men make more money than I do, only some; that not all men make more money than all women, only most; that not all men are rapists, only some; that not all men are promiscuous killers, only some; that not all men control Congress, the Presidency, the police, the army, industry, agriculture, law, science, medicine, architecture, and local government, only some.

    I sat down on the lawn and wept.

  • Joanna Russ Quote #19

    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 Quote #20

    The game is a dominance game called I Must Impress This Woman. Failure makes the active player play harder. Wear a hunched back or a withered arm; you will then experience the invisibility of the passive player. I'm never impressed -- no woman ever is -- it's just a cue that you like me and I'm supposed to like that. If you really like me, maybe I can get you to stop. Stop; I want to talk to you! Stop; I want to see you! Stop; I'm dying and disappearing!
    SHE: Isn't it just a game?
    HE: Yes, of course.
    SHE: And if you play the game, it means you like me, doesn't it?
    HE: Of course.
    SHE: Then if it's just a game and you like me, you can stop playing. Please stop.
    HE: No.
    SHE: Then I won't play.
    HE: Bitch! You want to destroy me. I'll show you. (He plays harder)
    SHE: All right. I'm impressed.
    HE: You really are sweet and responsive after all. You've kept your femininity. You're not one of those hysterical feminist bitches who wants to be a man and have a penis. You're a woman.
    SHE: Yes. (She kills herself)

  • Joanna Russ Quote #21

    The idea that any art is achieved 'intuitively' is a dehumanization of the brains, effort, and the traditions of the artist, and a classification of said artist as subhuman. It is those supposed incapable of intelligence, training, or connection with a tradition who are described as working by instinct or intuition.

  • Joanna Russ Quote #22

    The little blue book was rattling around in my purse. I took it out and turned to the last thing he had said (You stupid broad et cetera). Underneath was written Girl backs down--cries--manhood vindicated. Under Real Fight With Girl was written Don't hurt (except whores). I took out my own pink book, for we all carry them, and turning to the instructions under Brutality found:
    Man's bad temper is the woman's fault. It is also the woman's responsibility to patch things up afterwards.
    There were sub-rubrics, one (reinforcing) under Management and one (exceptional) under Martyrdom. Everything in my book begins with an M.

  • Joanna Russ Quote #23

    The re-evaluation and rediscovery of minority art (including the cultural minority of women) is often conceived as a matter of remedying injustice and exclusiveness through doing justice to individual artists by allowing their work into the canon, which will thereby be more complete, but fundamentally unchanged.

  • Joanna Russ Quote #24

    The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That's the trouble
    with women, too.

    [Existence (1975)]

  • Joanna Russ Quote #25

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

  • Joanna Russ Quote #26

    There is the vanity training, the obedience training, the self-effacement training, the deference training, the dependency training, the passivity training, the rivalry training, the stupidity training, the placation training. 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? I failed miserably and thought it was my own fault. You can't unite woman and human any more than you can unite matter and anti-matter; they are designed to not to be stable together and they make just as big an explosion inside the head of the unfortunate girl who believes in both.

  • Joanna Russ Quote #27

    There's no being out too late in Whileaway, or up too early, or in the wrong part of town, or unescorted. You cannot fall out of the kinship web and become sexual prey for strangers, for there is no prey and there are no strangers -- the web is world-wide. In all of Whileaway there is no one who can keep you from going where you please (though you may risk your life, if that sort of thing appeals to you), no one who will follow you and try to embarrass you by whispering obscenities in your ear, no one who will attempt to rape you, no one who will warn you of the dangers of the street, no one who will stand on street corners, hot-eyed and vicious, jingling loose change in his pants pocket, bitterly bitterly sure that you're a cheap floozy, hot and wild, who likes it, who can't say no, who's making a mint off it, who inspires him with nothing but disgust, and who wants to drive him crazy.

  • Joanna Russ Quote #28

    This is the underside of my world.

    Of course you don’t want me to be stupid, bless you! you only want to make sure you’re intelligent. You don’t want me to commit suicide; you only want me to be gratefully aware of my dependency. You don’t want me to despise myself; you only want the flattering deference to you that you consider a spontaneous tribute to your natural qualities. You don’t want me to lose my soul; you only want what everybody wants, things to go your way; you want a devoted helpmeet, a self-sacrificing mother, a hot chick, a darling daughter, women to look at, women to laugh at, women to come for comfort, women to wash your floors and buy your groceries and cook your food and keep your children out of your hair, to work when you need the money and stay home when you don’t, women to be enemies when you want a good fight, women who are sexy when you want a good lay, women who don’t complain, women who don’t nag or push, women who don’t hate you really, women who know their job and above all—women who lose. On top of it all, you sincerely require me to be happy; you are naively puzzled that I should be wretched and so full of venom in this the best of all possible worlds. Whatever can be the matter with me? But the mode is more than a little outworn.

    As my mother once said: the boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.

    But the frogs die in earnest.

  • Joanna Russ Quote #29

    To die on a dying Earth - I'd live, if only to weep.

  • Joanna Russ Quote #30

    WE WUZ PUSHED.

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