I think of the security of cages. How violence, cruelty, oppression, become a kind of home, a familiar pattern, a cage, in which we know how to operate and define ourselves.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how individuals can become accustomed to negative environments and behaviors, often accepting them as normal.
Eve Ensler’s quote suggests that people can find a disturbing sense of security within oppressive situations, viewing them as a familiar space where they define their identity and operate. This phenomenon can result in individuals becoming desensitized to violence, cruelty, and oppression, ultimately leading to a cycle in which such conditions become ingrained and accepted as the norm.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the impacts of domestic violence during a seminar on relationships.
Dancing insists we take up space, and though it has no set direction, we go there together. Dance is dangerous, joyous, sexual, holy, disruptive, and contagious and it breaks the rules. It can happen anywhere, at anytime, with anyone and everyone, and it's free. Dance joins us and pushes us to go further and that is why it's at the center of ONE BILLION RISING.
Before cancer, I was obviously disconnected. I had a tumor the size of a mango inside me and didn't do anything about it. It wasn't like I didn't know something was wrong.
It's a weird thing about the truth: It protects you. What really makes you vulnerable is when you're lying because you're going to get caught. When you tell the truth, there's a strange relief that comes.
Well, the tyranny of masculinity and the tyranny of patriarchy I think has been much more deadly to men than it has to women. It hasn’t killed our hearts. It’s killed men’s hearts. It’s silenced them, it’s cut them off.
Why are women immobile? Because so many feel like they’re waiting for someone to say, "You’re good, you’re pretty, I give you permission."
Security is elusive. It's impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. People change us. Nothing is secure.
My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
I don't consider myself a pessimist. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel soaked to the skin.
The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.
Everything on earth is beautiful, everything -- except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.
And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.
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