Since cancer, I feel like I have dreams rather than ambitions, visions rather than plans.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a shift in perspective from rigid ambitions to more fluid dreams and visions after experiencing cancer.
Eve Ensler's quote reflects a profound transformation in her approach to life following her battle with cancer. It suggests that facing such a life-altering challenge has led her to prioritize dreams over specific ambitions and to embrace visions rather than detailed plans. This change highlights the importance of flexibility and openness in pursuing one's passions and hopes, particularly after encountering significant adversity.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming adversity and embracing dreams.
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.
It's a cash and carry world. Sometimes you pay a little. Mostly it's a lot. Sometimes, it's everything you have.
Men dislike being awakened from their death in life.
There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.
In deference to such spectacular carnage it is perhaps perverse to dwell upon one person's death, but we are creatures so constituted that the passing of one friend or one acquaintance has a profounder effect that that of 100,000 strangers. If there is any metaphorical truth in the Jewish proverb that he who saves one life saves the whole world, then there is equal metaphorical truth in the proposition that when one person dies, the whole world dies with them.
It was like something you have dreaded and feared and dodged for years until it seemed like all your life, then despite everything it happened to you and all it was was just pain, all it did was hurt and so it was all over, all finished, all right.
I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany´s.
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