Quotes from Marilyn French

Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can't even think straight.

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.

Men's need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.

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

Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can't even think straight.

All the women I know feel a little like outlaws.

There was no justice, there was only life. And life she had.

It's strange how men feel they have the right to criticize a woman's appearance to her face.

She drowned in words that could not teach her how to swim.

Desire consumes you, it takes you over. You forget yourself completely. All you can think about is the other, the one you desire, your self is just a fire.

Later, she would remember these years, and realize with astonishment that she had, by fifteen, decided on most of the assumptions she would carry for the rest of her life: that people were essentially not evil, that perfection was death, that life was better than order and a little chaos good for the soul. Most important, this life was all. Unfortunately, she forgot these things, and had to remember them the hard way.

I have opened all the doors in my head. I have opened all the pores in my body. But only the tide rolls in.

What is a man, anyway? Everything I see around me in popular culture tells me a man is he who screws and kills. But everything I see around me in life tells me a man is he who makes money.

S and M is only the expression in the bedroom of an oppressive-submissive relation which can happen also in the kitchen or at the factory, can happen between people of any gender. There is obviously something titillating about these relationships, but it isn't the sexual components that makes them ugly, they're uglier elsewhere. Nothing sexual is depraved. Only cruelty is depraved, and that's another matter.

And there are so much easier ways to destroy a woman. You don't have to rape her or kill her; you don't even have to beat her. You can just marry her. You don't even have to do that. You can just let her work in your office for thirty-five dollars a week.

In a great gasp, puts her head in her hands again and cries as if her throat were a cave, as if the howling winds came from her belly, she cries like a storm that will never end.

Male territorial insanity yields only to another male. What a difference the possession of a penis makes!

All men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes.

I've known for a long time that hypocrisy is the secret of sanity. You mustn't let them know you know.

But communes are a good idea. People criticize communes because they don't last, but why in hell, will you tell me, should they last? Why does an order have to become a permanent order? Maybe we should live one way for some years, then try another.

Loneliness is not a longing for company, it is a longing for kind. And kind means people who can see you who you are, and that means they have enough intelligence and sensitivity and patience to do that.

But she continued to wonder what the fish tasted like, so brilliant and vivid pink. Would it taste pink?

It does seem true that a young woman may sometimes behave in a way that can be called titillating, and that men take such behavior as being directed entirely at them. [...] I've often seen blushing young men with shining eyes behave in the same way, but no one says of them that they want to be raped. If, after taking a few steps forward, they then decide to retreat, no one accuses them of being cunt teasers. In fact, the disappointed woman probably thinks it's all her fault.

Men: they are what they are and women have to accept that and try to shift around them. Especially men with power. Money. The upper hand. The raised hand. Momma`s philosophy. Here`s to you, Momma. She raised the empty cup. What`s the use of fighting them. What`s the use. To struggle, to live in anger takes everything out of you, drains you, makes people hate you and what`s the use? You get nothing you want, all you get is tired.