85 Quotes by Joanna Russ

Men succeed. Women get married.Men fail. Women get married.Men enter monasteries. Women get married.Men start wars. Women get married.Men stop them. Women get married.

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

The social invisibility of women's experience is not "a failure of human communication." It is a socially arranged bias persisted in long after the information about women's experience is available (sometimes even publicly insisted upon).

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.

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 is the protagonist of a Love Story.

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.

If you are a woman and wish to become pre-eminent in a field, it's a good idea to (a) invent it and (b) locate it in an area either so badly paid or of such low status that men don't want it

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 before, if no woman was ever that socially sacred creature, "a great writer," why do we think we can succeed now?

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