Eve Ensler Quotes

If I were rewriting 'Love, Medicine & Miracles,' I might consider changing its title to 'The Side Effects of Cancer.' Healing is hard work, as is any change one must make in one's life. I and others have learned, however, that the side effects of cancer may not all be bad ones.

Sometimes the worst thing that happens to you, the thing you think you can't survive...it's the thing that makes you better than you used to be.

You don't think you'll live past it and you don't really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that's still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.

Life is a process of evolution and anyone who thinks the current world order is OK does not get what evolution is all about.

Change is a process not an event.

I think continuity is a good thing. But change is sometimes good, too.

I have been through a lot of medical trauma. I was diagnosed with breast cancer .

I think that for those of us who come from oppressed backgrounds and who do our work in marginalized communities, recovering our innocence is one of the most important acts of self-liberation and de-colonization. Not letting the requirement that we adapt to impossible circumstances and unconscionable crimes leave us shackled to the kind of cynicism and armor such that we can't breathe and laugh and magnetize to ourselves all the genius and love and support that we need to transform the situation. That's probably the biggest challenge, is to recover our innocence.

I think it [my first heartbreak] probably just taught me that you will always heal. That this too shall pass. The first time you feel that sort of pain, you think it's never going to go away. Once you do survive it, you realize you can survive anything.

Writing about my illness put me into places. It was very triggering. I had to completely remove myself and practice self-care. I learned to be patient.

I want to try to not be the child that had to go through too much too young. I want to be who I am now and not who I was then.

I remember being in intensive care, looking at the clock and thinking 'don't go to sleep, don't go to sleep'. I can laugh about it now but I was petrified.

I have changed as everyone changes: within a permanency.

Life is a movement outward, an unfolding.

It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.

Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall.

If you knew me yesterday, please do not think that it is the same person that you are meeting today.

I pointed to the wound. "It's missing," I said. My grandmother smiled, and that was all it took for me to stop seeing the scar, and to recognize her again. "Yes," she said. "But see how much of me is left?

I used to try and take things in leaps and bounds. Now I've realized it's got to be step by step.

Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.

The future is a process, not a destination.

The body and mind are continually changing, and are, in fact, only names of series of changeful phenomena, like rivers whose waters are in a constant state of flux, yet presenting the appearance of unbroken streams. Every particle in this body is continually changing; no one has the same body for many minutes together, and yet we think of it as the same body.

Life is always moving, changing, shifting into its next shape. The movement is natural. It is how we evolve. Let the shifts happen. Take responsibility for yourself each step of the way. Trust the new shape and form of your world

Sometimes we have to be patient because the one thing that is inevitable in life is evolution. Whether it comes at the pace that we are expecting it or not, it’s inevitable.

Challenge the person you think you are in order to unveil the person you are capable of becoming