Top 23 Quotes & Sayings by Monique Wittig

It is quite possible for a work of literature to operate as a war machine upon its epoch.

I refuse to pronounce the names of possession and nonpossession.

men are not born with a faculty for the universal and ... women are not reduced at birth to the particular. The universal has been, and is continually, at every moment, appropriated by men. It does not happen by magic, it must be done. It is an act, a criminal act, perpetrated by one class against another. It is an act carried out at the level of concepts, philosophy, politics.

I feel a near passion for intelligence at grips with itself and not letting go.

The class struggle is precisely that which resolves the contradictions between two opposed classes by abolishing them at the same time that it constitutes and reveals them as classes.

They say that oppression engenders hate. They are heard on all sides crying hate hate.

The dictionary is, however, only a rough draft.

The bearers of fables are very welcome.

There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.

... I am with fire between my teeth and still nothing but my blank page.

Remember. Or, failing that, invent.

Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it.

there is no 'feminine writing' ... and one makes a mistake is using and giving currency to this expression.

They say that there is no reality before it has been given shape by words rules regulations. They say that in what concerns them everything has to be remade starting from basic principles. They say that in the first place the vocabulary of every language is to be examined, modified, turned upside down, that every word must be screened.

For there is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary.

Not only do we naturalize history, but also consequently we naturalize the social phenomena which express our oppression, making change impossible

Frankly, [the definition of woman] is a problem that the lesbians do not have because of a change of perspective. 'Woman' has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual, economic systems. Lesbians are not women.

One is a writer, or one is not.

The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual.

A materialist feminist approach to women's oppression destroys the idea that women are a 'natural group' . . . What the analysis accomplishes on the level of ideas, practice makes actual at the level of facts: by its very existence, lesbian society destroys the artificial (social) fact constituting women as a 'natural group.' A lesbian society pragmatically reveals that the division from men of which women have been the object is a political one . . .

It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary. The contrary would be to say that sex creates oppression, or to say that the cause (origin) of oppression is to be found in sex itself, in a natural division of the sexes preexisting (or outside of) society.

Today, together, let us repeat as our slogan that all trace of violence must disappear from this earth, then the sun will be honey-colored and music good to hear.

The basic agreement between human beings, indeed what makes them human and makes them social, is language.