Quotes by Joanna Russ

“Without meaningful work you might as well be dead.”

“(Ezekial saw the wheel(Way up in the middle of the air --(O Ezekial saw the wheel(Way in the middle of the air!(Now the big wheel runs by faith(And the little wheel runs by the grace of God --(The ...”

“This is the underside of my world.Of course you dont want me to be stupid, bless you! you only want to make sure youre intelligent. You dont want me to commit suicide; you only want me to be gratef...”

“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 an...”

“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 ...”

“(Only God can make a tree and She seldom tries, nowadays.)”

“It's not that the authors are unskilled, but we must frequently venture outside our areas of original training. Either the work lies outside anybody's area of original training, or orthodox critici...”

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

“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.Shrill vituperative no concern for the future of society maunder...”

“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 oth...”

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

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

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

“Well, of course, you can't expect people to rearrange their minds in five minutes. And I'm not good at this. And I don't want to do it. It's a bore, anyway. Unfortunately I know what will happen if...”

“And here, of course, we come to the one occupation of a female protagonist in literature, the one thing she can do, and by God she does it and does it and does it, over and over and over again.She ...”

“The game is a dominance game called I Must Impress This Woman. Failure makes the active player play harder. Wear a hunched back or a withered arm; you will then experience the invisibility of the p...”

“In college, educated women (I found out) were frigid; active women (I knew) were neurotic; women (we all knew) were timid, incapable, dependent, nurturing, passive, intuitive, emotional, unintellig...”

“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...”

“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...”