Joanna Russ Quotes

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?

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

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?

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

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

“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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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