Quotes from Joanna Russ

The reply to this was that Three took out a small revolver, and this surprised me; for everyone knows that anger is most intense towards those you know: it is lovers and neighbors who kill each other. There's no sense, after all, in behaving that way toward a perfect stranger; where's the satisfaction? No love, no need; no need, no frustration; no frustration, no hate, right? It must have been fear.

I think it no accident that the myth of the isolated achievement so often promotes women writers' less good work as their best work.

For years I said Let me in, Love me, Approve me, Define me, Regulate me, Validate me, Support me. Now I say Move over .

Thus in the bad days, in the dark swampy times.

For years I have been saying Let me in, Love me, Approve me, Define me, Regulate me, Validate me, Support me. Now I say Move over.

What I learned late in life, under my rain of lava, under my kill-or-cure, unhappily, slowly, stubbornly, barely, and in really dreadful pain, was that there is one and only one way to possess that in which we are defective, therefore that which we need, therefore that which we want. Become it.

I have had my share of trouble and sickness but always somewhere in me there is a little spot of warmth and joy to make it all easier, like a traveler's fire burning out in the wilderness on a cold night.

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.

There are few women who go around actually feeling: Oh, what a fascinating feminine mystery I am.

It seems to me (in the words of the narrator) that sexual equality has not yet been established on Earth and that (in the words of GBS) the only argument that can be made against it is that it has never been tried.

Still, the mythology persists in SF, as elsewhere, that women are naturally gentler than men, that they are naturally less creative than men, or less intelligent, or shrewder, or more cowardly, or more dependent, or more self-centered, or more self-sacrificing, or more materialistic, or shyer, or God knows what, whatever is most convenient at the moment.

You told me ghouls were male. Rodan is male - and asinine. King Kong is male. I could've been a witch, but the Devil is male. Faust is male. The man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima was male. I was never on the moon.

I had planned to consult with a Black colleague, but when I approached her in the hall she had a crowd of students about, all of them talking, a stack of books in one arm, a mass of student papers in the other, seven committee reports wedged in between, as well as her small daughter in a backpack, and she was looking surreptitiously at her watch. So I went on reading and taking notes.

Men don't like places like this where the secret maintenance work of femininity is carried on, just as they turn green and bolt when you tell them medical events are occurring in your genito-urinary system.

If Earth had been hit by plague, by fire, by war, by radiation, sterility, a thousand things, you name it, I'd still stand by her; I love her; I would fight every inch of the way there because my whole life is knit to her. And she'd need mourners. To die on a dying Earth- I'd live, if only to weep.

somebody called somebody else Slotface

OH, SOMEBODY ASIDES ME IS GONNA RUE THIS HERE PARTICULAR DAY.

I've never slept with a girl. I couldn't. I wouldn't want to. That's abnormal and I'm not, although you can't be normal unless you do what you want and you can't be normal unless you love men. To do what I wanted would be normal, unless what I wanted was abnormal, in which case it would be abnormal to please myself and normal to do what I didn't want to do, which isn't normal.

How withered away one can be from a life of unremitting toil.

[T]here is one and only one way to possess that in which we are defective, therefore that which we need, therefore that which we want. Become it.

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

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

There are more whooping cranes in the United States of America than there are women in Congress.

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