Eve Ensler Quotes

It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother's lips to kiss you.

The stories my pupils told me were astonishing. One told how he had witnessed his cousin being shot in the back five times; another how his parents had died of AIDS. Another said that he'd probably been to more funerals than parties in his young life. For me - someone who had had an idyllic, happy childhood - this was staggering.

When you see a 14-year-old boy who has never known what peace looks like for a day in his life, there's part of you as a human being that feels some degree, you can say, compassion for the fact that these boys have known war, famine, violence and death from the day they were born.

I am a woman like any other and ugly things happen to me like any other women.

I was brought up in a very poor and very violent household. I spent much of my childhood being afraid.

There is no life to be found in violence. Every act of violence brings us closer to death. Whether it's the mundane violence we do to our bodies by overeating toxic food or drink or the extreme violence of child abuse, domestic warfare, life-threatening poverty, addiction, or state terrorism.

I used to sleep on floors and face racial abuse.

Having been raised during the war, I know very well how childhood hampered by displacement, poverty, violence, and fear looks like.

Born down in a dead man's town, The first kick I took was when I hit the ground, You end up like a dog that's been beat too much, Till you spend half your life just covering up...

Strangely enough, for many many years I didn't talk about my childhood and then when I did I got a ton of mail - literally within a year I got a couple of thousand letters from people who'd had a worse childhood, a similar childhood, a less-bad childhood, and the question that was most often posed to me in those letters was: how did you get past the trauma of being raised by a violent alcoholic?

My childhood ended in this horrible way. I lived in a country where I didn't trust anybody.

I lived in Complexo do Alemao until I was 12, dealt with domestic violence in my childhood and faced difficulties in life.

Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.

Poverty is the worst form of violence.

All I'm trying to do is survive and make good out of the dirty, nasty, unbelievable lifestyle that they gave me.

Every single person in jail for a violent crime had a nightmare childhood.

I probably wouldn't be a songwriter if I didn't grow up the way I did. It was difficult and it was at times very scary to grow up in a household so unsettled and at times very violent. But, it also, I guess it earned me a sort of wisdom at a young age that's served me well.

If we are to save our children then we must become people they will look up to. Children need heroes now more than ever because the poor children of this nation live with monsters every day. Monsters deprive them of heat in the winter, they don't fix their sinks and toilets, they let garbage pile up in their hallways, they kick them out of their homes, they beat them, shoot them, stab them-sometimes to death-they rape their bodies and their minds. Sometimes they lurk under the stairs. They scuttle around in the dark; you hear them in the walls gnawing, squeaking, occasionally biting a little finger.

What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor.

It was traumatic for my children to see the British army en masse coming into our home and searching the house. I recall on one occasion, when our home was raided, my youngest son was standing at the top of the stairs - he would probably have been only three years of age - in his pyjamas. The soldiers came up the stairs, and he peed himself.

There is nothing the government has not done to me. There isn't any pain I haven't known.

There's many, many people who have been through a lot worse things than I went through. I lost my dad when I was 14 and to violence.

I was born and raised in war.

I had a very hard life in Kazakhstan.

Most incarcerated women have stories that are similar to mine. They suffered great trauma as children.