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The verb that's been enforced on girls is to please. Girls are trained to please...I want us all to change the verb. I want the verb to be educate, or activate, or engage, or confront, or defy, or create.

Eve Ensler

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Eve Ensler
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: May 25
Actor
Artist
Author
Autobiographer
Feminist
Playwright
Writer
New York City
New York
Girls
Verb
Please
Enforced
Defy
Create
Verbs
Girl
Confront
Change
Engage
Trained
Educate
Activate

More quotes by Eve Ensler

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People didn't feel so much shame around it and that they didn't feel so much humiliation around it. And the other thing that people have given me a lot of feedback about - something I'm very excited about - is all the stuff around chemo as an empathetic warrior.
Eve Ensler
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What I believe is that we have this extraordinary spirit inside ourselves, which for me is our Buddha nature. I believe we are in the process of opening and getting closer and closer to our Buddha nature and stripping away all that is covering it. I don't think I'm going to end up meeting this one being up there or out there.
Eve Ensler
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I despise charity. It gives crumbs to a few and silences the others.
Eve Ensler
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I'm a nomad. I have a place in New York in the Flatiron District, and I have a place in Paris in Ile Saint-Louis, and I spend a lot of time in Congo.
Eve Ensler
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In America, we have a government that is now run by white nationalists, by billionaires, by incredible misogynists.
Eve Ensler
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There were momentary visitations. I was a visitor, not an inhabitant. I think I say that at the beginning of the book: I have made visits to the earth in my body, but it's always been as a visitor.
Eve Ensler
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Once you are diagnosed with cancer, time changes. It both speeds up insanely and stops altogether.
Eve Ensler
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What I have found is that even when you try to transform existing structures they are so powerful they often overwhelm, seduce, and control you.
Eve Ensler
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Be transparent as wind, be as possible and relentless and dangerous, be what moves things forward without needing to leave a mark, be part of this collection of molecules that begins somewhere unknown and can't help but keep rising. Rising.Rising. Rising.
Eve Ensler
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Look, you do everything in stages, right? I don't think everything happens at once. There are so many layers we are constantly chipping away at, down and down and down, closer and closer to what would be the body. I think what happened with cancer, was that I woke up out of nine hours of surgery and I was body. I was just body.
Eve Ensler
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I am so grateful to be alive. It's ridiculous to be alive.
Eve Ensler
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To have insurance and have a diagnosis and to have doctors, I just felt it would be immoral on some level to complain.
Eve Ensler
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I think what all of us have in common is that we've been taught and trained and programmed to focus on fixing and mutilating ourselves. That's a core reason why women do not have power in the world.
Eve Ensler
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I want to read so I can read the Koran read the signs in the street know the number of the bus I'm supposed to take when I one day leave this house.
Eve Ensler
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I came out of the nine-hour surgery and I had tubes in every direction, and those nurses at the Mayo Clinic, I could cry for four days at the kindness of those nurses. The care, the detail of the care, the attention that just never wavered, never complained. The love.
Eve Ensler
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Danger lurks when people are dissociated and detached from their own story or feelings.
Eve Ensler
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If you were around in the '60s, you already know that music and art and love are a critical part of the revolution. This is how we fight.
Eve Ensler
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One of the things I think about when we talk about a violence,and relationship to spirituality is that it seems to me when you take something from someone that isn't yours or you hurt someone else, fundamentally, you actually do that to yourself. You actually unmake yourself, you work against your own being and your own matter.
Eve Ensler
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Today the United States has the highest prison population in the world, over 2.1 million people. ... We lock people up at a rate that is seven to ten times that of any other democracy.
Eve Ensler
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I think for me, happiness is crucial, but I think we think that happiness comes from amassing goods and getting things and being loved and being successful, when in fact my experience of happiness comes when you give everything away, when you serve people, when you're watching something you do make somebody happy, that's when happiness happens.
Eve Ensler