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Joanna Russ
117 quotes
“the demand for "attractiveness," like the existence of pornography, is sexual harassment, nothing more and nothing less.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How multiform the universe is, how branching, how structured, how crystalline! Mountain ranges, clouds, trees, human relations, human literary inventions-how fractal they all are! (Introduction)”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An examination of English literature or Western literature reveals that of all the possible actions people can do in this fiction, very few can be done by women. Our literature is not about women. It is not about women and men equally. It is by and about men. ("What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can't Write")”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Puberty is an awakening into sexual adulthood for both sexes. According to Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, it is also the time when the prison bars of "femininity," enforced by law and custom, shut the girl in for good. Even today entry into woman's estate is often not a broadening-out (as it is for boys) but a diminution of life. Feminist utopias offer an alternative model of female puberty, one which allows the girl to move into a full and free adulthood. ("Recent Feminist Utopias")”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whether tentative or conclusively pessimistic, the invented, all-female worlds, with their consequent lesbianism, have another function: that of expressing the joys of female bonding, which-like freedom and access to the public world-are in short supply for many women in the real world. Sexually, this amounts to the insistence that women are erotic integers and not fractions waiting for completion. Female sexuality is seen as native and initiatory, not (as in our traditionally sexist view) reactive, passive, or potential. ("Recent Feminist Utopias")”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Although the aesthetic satisfaction of the syllogistic form still attracts me, I'm no longer sure that it can handle much more complexity than that of a shopping list, let alone social criticism or the reconceptualization (or "breaking set") feminists have been calling the click! phenomenon for some two decades now.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We may not, by the way, be the only sapient beings in the galaxy-in fact the odds are heavily against such an occurrence-which probability sometimes gave me inexplicable comfort in the midst of the combined horrors of adolescence and the ghastliness of growing up to the tune of "Love and marriage / Go together like a horse and carriage," illegal abortion, and all the other viciousness we endured because we were young. There seem to be plenty of folks now who find that smothering, coercive, conformist, witch-hunting, red-baiting era an object of nostalgia. They can have it.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...if everything is related to everything else (which I believe) then you can start anywhere, and (if you attend carefully to your own experience and everything you know) you will find yourself forced to broaden your inquiry to include as much of everything else as you possibly can.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I began reading science fiction in the 1950s and got from it a message that didn't exist anywhere else then in my world. Explicit sometimes in the detachable ideas, implicit in the gimmicks, peeking out from behind often intolerably class-bigoted, racist, and sexist characterizations, somehow surviving the usual America-the-empire-is-good plots, most fully expressed in the strange life-forms and strange, strange, wonderfully strange landscapes, was the message: Things can be really different”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Science fiction is a natural, in a way, for any kind of radical thought. Because it is about things that have not happened and do not happen. It's usually placed in the future, but not always. It's very fruitful if you want to present the concerns of any marginal group, because you are doing it in a world where things are different.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Dialogue: Samuel R. Delany and Joanna Russ on Science Fiction” in ‘’Callaloo’’, No. 22 (Autumn, 1984)
“after having had contact with students for so many years, I think it's a lot harder to change somebody's life than people think. People will say they've been changed, but what they really mean is they read something which crystallized an awful lot of things they were already feeling. I don't think books really change people's minds very often; I think that's awfully rare.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What we have to watch out for, to keep from being suckered in, is when someone purports to explain not one particular concrete thing, but the way in which a whole species works.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's an awful lot of mythology hidden in science. The pathology that was hidden behind nineteenth-century science is beginning to be fairly obvious. I think that the same thing goes on today in sociology and psychology, even in biology.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The abortion question is illustrative of this. Women say, 'We want the right to own our own bodies.' And the opposition, the Moral Majority, say things like, 'When does life begin?' That's not the point. I don't give a damn when it begins. I don't give a damn what the real differences between men and women are. I just don't want to be stepped on when I walk out into the street. I don't want to have to go out at night in terror. I don't want you to tell me that you won't give me a decent job. I don't want to have a low salary. I don't want to be maltreated.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The same professors who talked about literature as an absolute value never talked about the sexist messages we were getting from it. The rules of conduct of that time, in the 1950s, were completely different for women, on campus, from what boys were permitted to do. There was a peculiar kind of tacit agreement to pretend that the absolute values were classless and sexless, even though they aren't.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You have to have conventions and rigid symbols and patterns before you can upset them.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This isn't something I feel the need to apologize for. The idea that every year or two years you're supposed to turn out these new books that are all going to be wonderful and commercially popular is a misguided notion that commerce has foisted upon us. The writing process has a rhythm all its own, and at least for me the rhythm is absolutely different for every book.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea that artists should be willing to push something as far as it will go, until they watch it crack, has always appealed to me.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Revision, self-criticism, change-all these are essential for any art form to maintain a sense of vitality.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“all political propaganda generally ends the same way: it's yours now, this thing isn't over; I can't tell you what finally happened because it hasn't finally happened yet! This is always a problem when you write anything with real social or political consciousness-what you're describing hasn't ended. I suppose this is true, in a way, of all fiction.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'll never understand the kind of writer who genuinely advances the proposition that life is a dream or a fiction. To me that's the voice of privilege, whether it's money, class, sex, color, or what have you. Most of us can't find refuge in anything so false.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We need to force the reader always to come back to where we all are. Otherwise, it's pure game playing, escapism. And you fall out with an awful shock.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People accept all sorts of attitudes-about racism, sexism, and class-simply because they don't have the time or the energy to think these things through. It's easier to accept the status quo, especially if you're part of a privileged group and want to think well of yourself. So one way to make people aware of how morally atrocious and even downright stupid many of their assumptions are is to confront them with a pattern whose meaning they think they're comfortable with-and then to undermine the whole thing, forcing them to see how arbitrary and wrong they've been.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“SF was born didactic! It originated as a teaching medium-which is why its potential to actually effect some changes in people's attitudes is infinitely greater. It's got representative protagonists, for example-at least it starts like this in the works of H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and other proto-SF writers. If you look at, say, The War of the Worlds, the human beings there may represent certain attitudes or types, but they are obviously not "individuals" in the sense that characters in the great realistic novels are.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“people will never be totally at home, spiritually, in any environment.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the most exciting things about working in SF for me, a woman, is that SF is so open-ended-it's perfectly possible to imagine a world where sexism doesn't exist, or in which women can be presented in the context of new myths that women can admire or learn from.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A lot of reviewers froth at the mouth whenever someone takes a hallowed situation and refuses to reinforce all the usual capitalist, imperialist, Americans-can-do-anything attitudes associated with it.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm not anti-utopian in spirit. I'm just not so naive as to think that people can discard who they are. My point isn't that utopia is impossible-I think "Bodies" presents a real utopia-but that creating it isn't as simple as most SF implies.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The point is to show how small the greatest of disasters can appear when seen from a distance of several billion miles or years.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've never lost the feeling of transcendental beauty and awe that attached itself to the physical world. Lucretius has a line in De Rerum Naturae that says something about how everything in nature fits together and gives a joy beyond expression. It's a feeling people have surely always had about the way the seasons or planets change, the way plants grow, a sense of joy or awe about what's around us.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What fascinated me about the theater then was that you could project a private reality onto actual material things: people, sets, voices, scenes. It gradually dawned on me that I could do this in words, too.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For women, there's simply no easy way of finding some kind of fulfillment. The whole idea of going from your own world to an alien world makes sense only if you're not an alien in your own world. It's very hard to feel at home here when you're not. So women either don't go into space-you're either there or here but without much traveling in between-or you came from there and now you're here, but what the hell are you doing here?”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“there is no God in any of my stories or in my beliefs. In fact, if there's one thread running throughout my fiction it's precisely the lack of that kind of authority. My books, I would say, are designed to undermine that notion, to force readers to question the authorities governing their lives, be they literary, sexual, political, religious, whatever. Cosmic awe isn't religion. I'm an atheist, and I loathe having religion imported into my work. If you believe in religion, do it, but don't assume or insist that I do.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art is collective. Always, it has a tradition behind it. Always. And they will let some of us in but they will not let our traditions in with us or our aesthetic in with us.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Real artists, it seems to me, are those who don't repeat themselves.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's the people who are on the "wrong" side of the equation in all these splits who are making theory and doing coalition work and are absolutely crucial for our future.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anger isn't the only thing that happens. There's also an enormous access of energy that comes from finally turning the oppression the other way and saying, "There's nothing wrong with us. There's something wrong with all of you.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The wonderful and terrible thing about politics in the very broadest sense is that you never know enough, you always find out more and more, and, of course, as you find it out, it changes, too.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Either you write what is essentially autobiographical or you have to do something else. You cannot imitate a genre which was intended to exclude you.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My books are a lot less politically conscious than people think. I will write them first because it is sprouting and I have to do it. Afterward I can look at them and say, "Now, that's what I was doing.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I often read something and I say, “That's a goddamn lie. I'm going to tell the truth.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As I see it, there are three stages of science fiction. The first is inventing things: telepathy-geez, wow, gosh!; robots-wow! The second stage is what [Isaac] Asimov does with his robot stories, where you construct a plausible society for this to happen in. And the third when you use it for some other purpose. I think that Delany and Disch and Le Guin and Gene Wolfe and I are third-stage writers.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am not religious. I am a socialist atheist just as my mother and her parents were. I come out of that radical Jewish socialist tradition that started in roughly 1900. These secular Jews took the messianic, utopian promise of religious Judaism and transferred it to this world. I'm very much part of that tradition, and I didn't even realize it until recently. I've been reading books about the Pale in Russia [where the czars allowed Jews to live] and the ghetto life there; I recognize a lot of things that I didn't even know came from there which deal with me.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you take things and turn them on their heads you often get the truth. If you push things logically further and further until they explode into their opposites, then you've got something artistic and truthful.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You notice that some of the stuff by men that I would call certainly pornographic, Henry Miller, for instance, is taken very seriously. It’s all so obvious. When women do it, it’s silly, when men do it, it’s serious.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The mystery stories are very interesting because again, often the ones that women write are as good as or not as good as the ones the guys write, but the women write about personalities, about characters, and what is character-driven. The men tend not to; they are more comfortable apparently with technical problems. I think the best writers are the kind who do both at the same time.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every culture will find justification for everything they believe or want to believe. I still think that a lot of the world is still in shock, and I think probably what brought it on was easier birth control. The sort of, where are we, what do we do now?”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s still very much a different world for men and women.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s that idea of disguise that I find myself coming back to. You can really, in a sense, be anybody or anybodies, plural, in writing.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source