Joanna Russ Quotes

29 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Joanna Russ
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.

Joanna Russ
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?

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

Joanna Russ
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.

Joanna Russ
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.

Joanna Russ
And you think they'll let you, said Machine. It was a flat, sad statement.
No, she said, but nobody ever let me do anything in my life before and I never let that stop me.

Joanna Russ
Remember: 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.
What future is there for a female child who aspires to being Humphrey Bogart?

Joanna Russ
Fucking, if you will forgive the pun, is an anti-climax.

Joanna Russ
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.

Joanna Russ
I told him to open his eyes, that I didn't want to kill him with his eyes shut, for God's sake.

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

Joanna Russ
If you want to be an assassin, remember that you must decline all challenges. Showing off is not your job.
If you are insulted, smile meekly. Don't break your cover.
Be afraid. This is information about the world.
You are valuable. Push yourself.
Take the easiest way out whenever possible. Resist curiosity, pride, and the temptation to defy limits. You are not your own woman and must be built to last.
Indulge hatred. Action comes from the heart.
Pray often. How else can you quarrel with God?

Joanna Russ
Rational people, said the man, realize that their lives must be made meaningful. Meaning isn't just given us.

Joanna Russ
He wished his imagination would not take so impressionistic a turn. It never fails.

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

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

Joanna Russ
Houses stretched off on all sides, sometimes dipping below the ground and sometimes emerging out of it, piling themselves into pyramids, into almost toppling waves, never one rooftree more than eighty yards from the next. The planet was covered. There were the old, open-air cities planted with whatever would grow, mountains honeycombed, resorts in Antarctica, covered roads crammed with carrier traffic only, hovercraft, sea-craft, masses, structures, and installations under the sea, nets of algae towed in the air, some insects and no animals whatever, but people, people, people everywhere.
What's the opposite of the Garden of Eden?

Joanna Russ
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.

Joanna Russ
Well, hell, said Jael more genuinely, the war. If there isn't one, there just was one, and if there wasn't one, there soon will be one. Eh? The war between Us and Them.

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

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

Joanna Russ
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.

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

Joanna Russ
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).

Joanna Russ
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.

Joanna Russ
Remember, I don't threaten. I don't play. I always carry firearms. The truly violent are never without them.

Joanna Russ
Dismissing the whole thing as the world's aberration and not mine, I went back to bed.

Joanna Russ