Joanna Russ Quotes

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”.

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

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

To die on a dying Earth - I'd live, if only to weep

Ignorance is not bad faith. But persistence in ignorance is.

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

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

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.

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

I'm not a girl. I'm a genius.

Real artists, it seems to me, are those who don't repeat themselves.

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

Art is collective. Always, it has a tradition behind it.

You can't imbibe someone's success by f*cking them.

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

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

[T]here is one and only one way to possess that in which we are defective, therefore that which we need, therefore that which we want. Become it.

Civilization must be preserved, ' says he.'Civilization's doing fine, ' I said. 'We just don't happen to be where it is.

This book is written in blood.Is it written entirely in blood?No, some of it is written in tears. Are the blood and tears all mine?Yes, they have been in the past, but the future is a different ma

If you want to live forever you are dreadfully dangerous because you're not living now.

I left her wallpapering her much-loved, much-tended little corner of hell.

To die on a dying Earth - I'd live, if only to weep.

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

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

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

Without meaningful work you might as well be dead.