Best 34 quotes of Jessa Crispin on MyQuotes

American culture never necessarily made sense to me, but they should warn you: leaving comes with a huge sense of alienation that never goes away.

A wild appreciation of men and women . . . who passionately and fearlessly and recklessly redefine romance. . . . The passionate creatures who refuse to play it safe and settle down now have an intelligent, like-minded advocate.

Feminism now seems to be defined as success is defined: as being as good at capitalism as men are. I feel very estranged from it.

Go to a place and just send out emails. That's my entire life. I go to countries and I ask, "Who would I know who lives here?" Not even do I know, but who exists and is on the planet.

I believe in free will.

I don't behave the way people necessarily want me to, but I tried behaving that other way for a short period of time and it didn't take.

I don't think that if I had spent the time that I was in, say, Belgrade, writing about my time in Trieste, which is where I had just been, that would have been productive. I told myself: take extensive notes while you're there, do the research part of it, and then pray, pray, the muses will be available when the actual 'ready' happens.

I have a really good life and I really like it.

I have yet to get sued. My father thinks I should get liability insurance.

I knew my motivations for going to each place and what I was looking for. If I don't do that then I generally don't write about my travels.

I like European and South American literature, but mostly I read nonfiction.

I mean, many times your creative problem is accidentally your personal problem, but it's not quite the same.

I think American literature is in a tedious place, horrible place. I can't even engage with it.

I understand maybe some people are more impressionable than my hard, cynical self, but maybe they need to figure out how to be less of that.

I was twenty-one when I was hired by Planned Parenthood. It was my first work experience outside of either temping or working for my father at his store.

Just send the emails and talk to people. Spend all your money on nail polish and opera tickets.

Most of what I do is for creative people - writers and painters and photographers - trying to work through creative problems.

My belief that the publishing industry is run by prigs and cowards dates back to many years before I even had the idea for the book.

Talk to people who know more than you. I feel like we're in this stupid sea of opinion, like "My opinion is valid because it's mine and I have it.

There's this resistance to actually talking to people who are smarter than you about things and I don't know why that is.

Women still get angry at me. I mean, men go after me sometimes, but most of the bad responses come from women.

You don't have to go to New York and you don't have to go to LA or London. Go somewhere cheap. Go somewhere with free art museums and then just go to art museums.

[F]eminism has been moving away from being about collective action and collective imagination, and toward being a lifestyle. Lifestyles do not change the world.

If there ever were one moment where everything worked for us, where we lived in harmony and at ease with our natures, then we would still be there. There is no garden to return to, no idyllic perfect childhood, no enwombed state. The Garden of Eden was boring, childhood is a nightmare we should all be grateful to be done with, and your mother smoked while she was pregnant and poisoned you in the womb with artificial sugar substitutes. The best thing any of us can do is just to keep fucking up in a forward motion, and see what comes out of it.

If you are surrounded by people who agree with you, you do not have to do much thinking. If you are surrounded by people who identify themselves the same way you do, you do not have to work at constructing a unique identity. If you are surrounded by people who behave the same way you do, you do not have to question your own choices.

It is always easier to find your sense of value by demeaning another’s value. It is easier to define yourself as ‘not that,’ rather than do an actual accounting of your own qualities and put them on the scale.

It is our entire culture, the way it runs on money, rewards inhumanity, encourages disconnection and isolation, causes great inequality and suffering, that's the enemy. That is the only enemy worth fighting.

Nationalism tends to strengthen during times of struggle. Individuals fall on hard times, they find themselves suffering from unemployment or poverty or displacement, which causes self-doubt. People erase that self-doubt, or at least cover it up, by suddenly proclaiming participation in a larger project, the project of a nation. Their nation is great, their nation has a tremendous history, and so they are allowed to participate in that greatness, to possess it, to play a part in that tremendous history.

Safety is about control. In order to feel safe, things have to be made predictable. And the only way in life to make something predictable is to control the outcome

There are advantages to being labeled the victim. You are listened to, paid attention to. Sympathy is bestowed upon you.

This idea that women will “change the culture” of any given industry is an easy lie to buy into. Even if women go in with good intentions, good intentions are nothing against the system. The system is older than you. It has absorbed more venom than you can ever hope to emit. You will not even slow it down. In order to gain entry, you will have to exhibit the characteristics of the patriarchs who built it. In order to advance, you will have to mimic their behavior, take on their values. Their values are power, the love of power, and the display of power. By then, you are part of their culture.

We don't do well with infinity and endless possibility, and so we break things down into individual units and into stories. And then we accidentally believe in those stories, and we accidentally start acting them out. Stories about what love is, what happiness is. What men are, what women are. Unable to shape our own stories about the madness that surrounds us, we get infected with other people's stories, trying to ignore the discomfort that comes with an imperfect fit.

We have to imagine something before we can build the infrastructure that will allow it to exist. We have failed here on both fronts: in imagination and in reality. Our great weirdos, from Emily Dickinson to Simone Weil to Coco Chanel, are seen as outliers, as not relevant to the way we think through what we want out of life. It's the same way we discuss radical feminist writers like Dworkin and Firestone. Dworkin is unhinged, Firestone is too eccentric to be taken seriously.

Women have participated in almost every fight for freedom. They were there when civilians were targeted they were there when the bombs were planted. To argue they didn't have enough power to speak up or they had been brainwashed by their male colleagues is to try to disassociate from the darkness that resides in everyone. And to disassociate from your darkness is to lose your power over it.