Quotes from Marilyn French

Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape?

To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.

My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of western civilization, to make it a feminist world.

Oh, God, why don't I remember that a little chaos is good for the soul?

There's power to: and everyone should have that, but everyone doesn't. Power to play Bach, or tennis, or boccie if you like. And there's power over; and no one should have that, but people do.

There is no power greater than the power of passive dependency.

Never underestimate the power of helplessness!

you can't equate passive dependent power with assertive power because the dependent kind isn't fun, it doesn't give you a kick, it just allows you to survive.

Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.

To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, is more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.

The view of life as a struggle for power generates a language in which life has no significance and only power matters.

When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress?

'I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes,' she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the damned dishes.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water.

Not many men have both good fortune and good sense.

All my life I've read that the life of the mind is preeminent, and that it can transcend all bodily degradation. But that's just not my experience. When your body has to deal all day with shit and string beans, your mind does too.

In Harlem the government pushes heroin to keep the blacks down and doctors by the thousands give barbiturates and tranquilizers to all the housewives: keep the natives quiet. when the drugs don't work anymore, they put the blacks in jail and us in here. Don't make noise. I read a poem once, it had a line, something like 'You keep stiller when every time you move something jangles'.

She was dizzy with her own feelings, her own voice. She was flying around on a carnival machine that would not stop, she could not make it stop and she screamed and screamed.

Some people use bullfights, some the Mass, some art in order to ritualize or transform death into life or at least meaning. But my terror is that life itself is a ritual transforming everything into death.

That's sheer luck too: luck of the draw of birth: century, continent, nation, section, sex, color, socioeconomic sector.

and I'd die of his emptiness even more than I'm dying of my own.

Blum remarks that Kant and Hegel specify that rationality, self-control, strength of will, consistency, adherence to duty and obligation, and acting on 'universal' principles comprise moral behavior; they specifically exclude from the makeup of moral man qualities like sympathy, compassion, kindness, nurturance, and concern for the community, which are associated with women.

In Russia they put you in insane asylums if you disagree with the state: it's not so different here. Keep the natives quiet.

My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don't matter.