Top 56 Susan Griffin Quotes
#1. Even in the grimmest of circumstances, a shift in perspective can create startling change.
Susan Griffin
#2. There is a circle of humanity, he told me, and I can feel its warmth. But I am forever outside.
Susan Griffin
#3. Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.
Susan Griffin
#4. His insights have come to him through a crack in the veneer of civilization, which was also a crack in his own soul. He had the courage to look in this direction.
Susan Griffin
#5. One can find traces of every life in each life.
Susan Griffin
#6. I think we actually punish children out of their relationship with their bodies ... we categorically separate mind and body and emotion and intellect.
Susan Griffin
#7. Every time I deny myself I commit a kind of suicide.
Susan Griffin
#8. What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.
Susan Griffin
#9. To grasp the truth is a delicate gesture, like taking a hand in greeting, a lightness of touch is needed if one is to feel the presence of another being.
Susan Griffin
#10. We are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature.
Susan Griffin
#11. The body remembers who we are supposed to be. And in this there is grief.
Susan Griffin
#12. At the museum a troubled woman destroys a sand painting meticulously created over days by Tibetan monks. The monks are not disturbed. The work is a meditation. They simply begin again.
Susan Griffin
#13. Masculinity is a terrible problem, as we construe it and shape it.
Susan Griffin
#14. Language is filled
with words for deprivation
images so familiar
it is hard to crack language open
into that other country
the country of being.
Susan Griffin
#15. The world of fundamental religion does not recognize even the slightest variation in meaning should this meaning fall outside its own definition of truth.
Susan Griffin
#16. I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from the earth, each other, ourselves.
Susan Griffin
#17. Although the many virtues that courtesans possessed were employed to defy circumstances, the role they played depended on the same circumstances over which they triumphed- conditions which to, fortunately for modern women, no longer exist.
Susan Griffin
#18. I know I am made from this earth, as my mother's hands were made from this earth, as her dreams came from this earth and all that I know, I know in this earth, the body of the bird, this pen, this paper, these hands, this tongue speaking, all that I know speaks to me through this earth.
Susan Griffin
#19. The ability for a woman to be free is connected with her ability to love another woman.
Susan Griffin
#20. But still, the other voice, the intuitive, returns, like grass forcing its way through concrete.
Susan Griffin
#21. Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us.
Susan Griffin
#22. Telling a story of illness, one pulls a thread through a narrow opening flanked on one side by shame and the other by trivia.
Susan Griffin
#23. In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism.
Susan Griffin
#24. Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.
Susan Griffin
#25. Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture's image of what is female.
Susan Griffin
#26. I grew up right near Hollywood, and I wanted to be a filmmaker.
Susan Griffin
#27. Gender is a way to hide from the simple truth we all tell: 'Hey, I'm here, I have a body.'
Susan Griffin
#28. The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.
Susan Griffin
#29. What at one time one refuses to see never vanishes but returns, again and again, in many forms.
Susan Griffin
#30. A story is told as much by silence as by speech.
Susan Griffin
#31. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.
Susan Griffin
#32. In the system of chivalry, men protect women against men. This is not unlike the protection relationship which [organized crime] established with small businesses in the early part of this century. Indeed, chivalry is an age-old protection racket which depends for its existence on rape.
Susan Griffin
#34. Yes we are devilish; that is true we cackle. Yes we are dark like the soil and wild like the animals. And we turn to each other and stare into this darkness. We find it beautiful. We find this darkness irresistible. We cease all hiding.
Susan Griffin
#35. We keep secrets from ourselves that all along we know.
Susan Griffin
#36. There is always a time to make right what is wrong.
Susan Griffin
#37. And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference.
Susan Griffin
#38. [P]erhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.
Susan Griffin
#39. How many small decisions accumulate to form a habit? What a multitude of decisions, made by others, in other times, must shape our lives now.
Susan Griffin
#41. Philosophy means nothing unless it is connected to birth, death, and the continuance of life. Anytime you are going to build a society that works, you have to begin from nature and the body.
Susan Griffin
#42. It is a grief over the fate of the Earth that contains within it a joyful hope, that we might reclaim this Earth.
Susan Griffin
#43. Ordinary women attempt to change our bodies to resemble a pornographic ideal. Ordinary women construct a false self and come to hate this self.
Susan Griffin
#44. The hard surface of the stone is impervious to nothing in the end. The heat of the sun leaves evidence of daylight. Each drop of rain changes the form; even the wind and the air itself, invisible to our eyes, etches its presence. ... All history is taken in by stones.
Susan Griffin
#46. Far more frightening than the thought of dying was the experience of erasure already occurring in my life. My fear of becoming someone who did not count.
Susan Griffin
#47. Borrow a child and get on welfare.
Borrow a child and stay in the house all day with the child,
or go to the public park with the child, and take the child
to the welfare office and cry and say your man left you and
be humble and wear your dress and your smile, and don't talk
back ...
Susan Griffin
#48. What always seems miraculous is when aesthetic necessities yield an insight which otherwise I would have missed.
Susan Griffin
#49. This earth is my sister; I love her daily grace, her silent daring, and how loved I am. How we admire this strength in each other, all that we have lost, all that we have suffered, all that we know: We are stunned by this beauty, and I do not forget: what she is to me, what I am to her.
Susan Griffin
#50. There is always time to make right what is wrong.
Susan Griffin
#51. If these pages are thick with death, think of the battlefield. Corpses in different stages of decay, the slowly dying, moments of death exist around you everywhere. Who are you? You are among the living, but can you be certain?
Susan Griffin
#52. The authorities did not wish to confront those citizens with the sight of the dead. Finally bodies were dumped unidentified into mass graves. Like plutonium waste which we would like to forget, these bodies had become poisonous.
Susan Griffin
#53. Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight is a masterpiece of complex an nuanced thinking not only about a significant problem that faces women but about our culture. A very valuable book.
Susan Griffin
#54. This is the paradox of vision: Sharp perception softens our existence in the world.
Susan Griffin
#55. I think artists can go to a level of vision that can often save us from a situation which seems to have no solution whatsoever.
Susan Griffin
#56. Each life reverberates in every other life. Whether or not we acknowledge it, we are connected, woven together in our needs and desires, rich and poor, men and women alike.
Susan Griffin
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