85 Quotes by Joanna Russ

Life has to end. What a pity! Sometimes, when one is alone, the universe presses itself into one’s hands: a plethora of joy, an organized plentitude.

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

I often wonder why women have careers,′ said Shredded Napkin suddenly, showing his teeth. I don’t think he can possibly be saying what I think he’s saying. He isn’t, of course. Never mind. I’ll stand this because Reality is dishing it out and I suppose I ought to learn to adjust to it. Besides, he may be sincere. There is a human being in there. At least he isn’t telling me about something he read in the paper on women’s liberation and then laughing at it.

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 other. There’s no sense, after all, in behaving that way toward a perfect stranger; where’s the satisfaction? No love, no need; no need, no frustration; no frustration, no hate, right? It must have been fear.

I have had my share of trouble and sickness but always somewhere in me there is a little spot of warmth and joy to make it all easier, like a traveler’s fire burning out in the wilderness on a cold night.

This is until you’re forty-five, ladies, after which you vanish into thin air like the smile of the Cheshire cat leaving behind only a disgusting grossness and a subtle poison that automatically infects every man under twenty-one.

They validate perceptions that need validating, especially in adolescence – ie, under the bland, forced optimism of American life terrible forces are at work, things are not what they seem, and if you feel lonely, persecuted, a misfit, and in terror, you aren’t crazy. You’re right.

Thus in the bad days, in the dark swampy times.

An as-yet-unpublished poet in Boulder, Colorado, once said to me that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. I may seem, in the foregoing sketchy pages, to have followed her advice rather too well.