Susan Griffin Quotes

A story is told as much by silence as by speech.

And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference.

In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism.

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.

Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.

The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.

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.

Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.

we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature.

It is a grief over the fate of the Earth that contains within it a joyful hope, that we might reclaim this Earth.

... This is the paradox of vision: Sharp perception softens our existence in the world.

What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.

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.

Even in the grimmest of circumstances, a shift in perspective can create startling change.

One can find traces of every life in each life.

Society, like nature, is one body, really.

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.

We are nature. We are nature seeing nature. The red-winged blackbird flies in us.

But still, the other voice, the intuitive, returns, like grass forcing its way through concrete.

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.

We keep secrets from ourselves that all along we know.

What always seems miraculous is when aesthetic necessities yield an insight which otherwise I would have missed.

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 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.

Ordinary women attempt to change our bodies to resemble a pornographic ideal. Ordinary women construct a false self and come to hate this self.

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.

Telling a story of illness, one pulls a thread through a narrow opening flanked on one side by shame and the other by trivia.

Waging war is not a primary physical need.

Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us.

Every time I deny myself I commit a kind of suicide.

There is always a time to make right what is wrong.

War starts in the mind, not in the body.

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.

The body remembers who we are supposed to be. And in this there is grief.

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.

What at one time one refuses to see never vanishes but returns, again and again, in many forms.

I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from each other, the earth, ourselves.

The world of fundamental religion does not recognize even the slightest variation in meaning should this meaning fall outside its own definition of truth.

Before a secret is told one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.

I think we actually punish children out of their relationship with their bodies... we categorically separate mind and body and emotion and intellect.