Quotes from Eve Ensler

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.

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.

I began to see my body like an iPad or a car. I would drive it and demand things from it. It had no limits. It was invincible. It was to be conquered and mastered like the Earth herself.

I have been struggling to find my way back into my body my whole life.

It seems to me that we spend an inordinate amount of time and attention on fixing ourselves when we could really be directing that out to serving others.

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.

Security isn't what I hunger for. I hunger for change. I hunger for connection.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Geography does not define you - love does.

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.

Security is elusive. It's impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. People change us. Nothing is secure.

The U.N. now says that one out of three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in their lifetime; we're talking about the desecration of the primary resource of the planet."

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

Three of the ten principles governing the City of Joy are (a) tell the truth, (b) stop waiting to be rescued, and (c) give away what you want the most.

Slowly, it dawned on me that nothing was more important than stopping violence toward women—that the desecration of women indicated the failure of human beings to honor and protect life

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.

The African specialist Nahid Toubia puts it plain [when speaking of female genital mutilation]: In a man it would range from amoutation of most of the penis, to "removal of all the penis, its roots of soft tissue and part of the scrotal skin.

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.

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

The clitoris is pure in purpose. It is the only organ in the body designed purely for pleasure. The clitoris is simply a bundle of nerves: 8,000 nerve fibers, to be precise. That's a higher concentration of nerve fibers than is found anywhere else in the male or female body, including the fingertips, lips, and tongue, and it is twice, twice, twice the number in the penis. Who needs a hand gun when you've got a semi-automatic?