Joanna Russ Quotations

Faith is not contrary to the usual ideas, something that turns out to be right or wrong, like a gambler's bet.

... chastity is not given once and for all like a wedding ring that is put on never to be taken off, but is a garden which each day must be weeded, watered, and trimmed anew, or soon there will be only brambles and wilderness.

[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.

The techniques are all means of dealing with one simple idea: She wrote it. (That is, the "wrong" person--in this case, female--has created the "right" value--i.e., art.) Denial of Agency: She didn't write it. Pollution of Agency: She shouldn't have written it. Double Standard of Content: Yes, but look what she wrote about. False Categorizing: She is not really she [an artist] and it is not really it [serious, of the right genre, aesthetically sound, important, etc.] so how could "she" have written "it"? Or simply: Neither "she" nor "it" exists (simple exclusion).

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 beforewhy do we think we can succeed now?

You can't imbibe someone's success by f*cking them.

When one culture has the big guns and the other has none, there is a certain predictablity about the outcome.

And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).

Privileged groups, like everyone else, want to think well of themselves and to believe that they are acting generously and justly.

Leaning her silly, beautiful, drunken head on my shoulder, she said, "Oh, Esther, I don't want to be a feminist. I don't enjoy it. It's no fun." "I know," I said. "I don't either." People think you decide to be a "radical," for God's sake, like deciding to be a librarian or a ship's chandler. You "make up your mind," you "commit yourself" (sounds like a mental hospital, doesn't it?). I said Don't worry, we could be buried together and have engraved on our tombstone the awful truth, which some day somebody will understand: WE WUZ PUSHED.

The demon got up. The demon said Fool. To think you can eat their food and not talk to them. To think you can take their money and not be afraid of them. To think you can depend on their company and not suffer from them.

I'm not a girl. I'm a genius.

Art is collective. Always, it has a tradition behind it.

Sit a man on his ass with nothing to do but eat and the first thing that goes is his mind. It never fails.

Real artists, it seems to me, are those who don't repeat themselves.

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

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

Anyway everyboy (sorry) knows that what women have done that is really important is not to constitute a great, cheap labor force that you can zip in when you're at war and zip out again afterwards but to Be Mothers, to form the coming generation, to give birth to them, to nurse them, to mop floors for them, to love them, cook for them, clean for them, change their diapers, pick up after them, and mainly sacrifice themselves for them. This is the most important job in the world. That's why they don't pay you for it.

....thinking you are attacking society when you condemn or ravage the hypothetical Nice Girl Next Door is the exact equivalent of thinking that stealing from the local supermarket makes you a Communist.

I think we ought to decide that man-hating is not only respectable but honorable. To be a misandrist a woman needs considerable ingenuity, originality, and resilience. A misogynist requires no such resources.

To act in a way both sexist and racist, to maintain one's class privilege, it is only necessary to act in the customary, ordinary, usual, even polite manner.

Science fiction, as I mentioned before, writes about what is neither impossible nor possible; the fact is that, when the question of possibility comes up in science fiction, the author can only reply that nobody knows. We haven't been there yet. We haven't discovered that yet. Science fiction hasn't happened.

I didn’t and don’t want to be a ‘feminine’ version or a diluted version or a special version or a subsidiary version or an ancillary version, or an adapted version of the heroes I admire. I want to be the heroes themselves.

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

To die on a dying Earth - I'd live, if only to weep

Ignorance is not bad faith. But persistence in ignorance is.

As my mother once said: The boys throw stones at the frog in jest. But the frogs die in earnest.

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

Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.

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

I once asked a young dissertation writer whether her suddenly grayed hair was due to ill health or personal tragedy; she answered: “It was the footnotes”.