Quotes from Joanna Russ

Aggressive and bellicose persons," said Janet with care, "always assume that unaggressive and pacific persons cannot protect themselves. "Why is that?

I think from now on, I will not trust anyone who isn't angry.

The social invisibility of women's experience is not "a failure of human communication." It is a socially arranged bias persisted in long after the information about women's experience is available (sometimes even publicly insisted upon).

Then he said, leaning forward: 'You're strange animals, you women intellectuals. Tell me: what's it like to be a woman?' I took my rifle from behind my chair and shot him dead. 'It's like that,' I said.

Everyone knows that much as women want to be scientists and engineers, they want foremost to be womanly companions to men (what?)

They validate perceptions that need validating, especially in adolescence--ie, under the bland, forced optimism of American life terrible forces are at work, things are not what they seem, and if you feel lonely, persecuted, a misfit, and in terror, you aren't crazy. You're right.

When the memory of one's predecessors is buried, the assumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time. And if no one ever did it before, if no woman was ever that socially sacred creature, "a great writer," why do we think we can succeed now?

We would gladly have listened to her (they said) if only she had spoken like a lady. But they are liars and the truth is not in them.

You have on your history," said the artist, "and we're not used to that, believe me. Not to history. Not to old she-wolves with livid marks running up their ribs and arms, and not to the idea of fights in which people are neither painlessly killed nor painlessly fixed up but linger and die--slowly--or heal--slowly.

At twenty-nine you can't waste your time reading.

In my sleep I had a dream and this dream was a dream of guilt. It was not human guilt but the kind of helpless, hopeless despair that would be felt by a small wooden box or geometrical cube if such objects had consciousness; it was the guilt of sheer existence.

I cannot get into this swamp or I will never get out; and if I start crying again I'll remember that I have no one to love, and if anyone treats me like that again, I'll kill him. Only I mustn't because they'll punish me.

Until you learn better, you think that a landscaped world can't hurt you or please you, you needn't bother about its soul, you needn't be wary of its good looks. Until you learn better.

Civilization must be preserved,' says he. 'Civilization's doing fine,' I said. 'We just don't happen to be where it is.

Life has to end. What a pity! Sometimes, when one is alone, the universe presses itself into one's hands: a plethora of joy, an organized plentitude.

In my opinion, questions that are based on something real ought to be settled by something real without all this damned lazy miserable drifting

If you are a woman and wish to become pre-eminent in a field, it's a good idea to (a) invent it and (b) locate it in an area either so badly paid or of such low status that men don't want it

I know you're competent and your thesis advisor knows you're competent. The question in our minds is are you really serious about what you're doing?" This was said to a young woman who had already spent five years and over $10,000 getting to that point in her Ph.D. program.

This is until you're forty-five, ladies, after which you vanish into thin air like the smile of the Cheshire cat leaving behind only a disgusting grossness and a subtle poison that automatically infects every man under twenty-one.

If you want me to do something else useful, you had better show me what that something else is.

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.

This book is written in blood. Is it written entirely in blood? No, some of it is written in tears.

WE WUZ PUSHED.

you can't imbibe someone's success by fucking them.