Susan Griffin Quotes & Sayings

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

One can find traces of every life in each life. — Susan Griffin

The telling and the hearing of a story is not a simple act. The one who tells must reach down into deeper layers of the self, reviving old feelings, reviewing the past. Whatever is retrieved is reworked into a new form, one that narrates events and gives the listener a path through these events that leads to some fragment of wisdom. The one who hears takes the story in, even to a place not visible or conscious to the mind, yet there. In this inner place a story from another life suffers a subtle change. As it enters the memory of the listener it is augmented by reflection, by other memories, and even the body hearing and responding in the moment of the telling. By such transmissions, consciousness is woven. — Susan Griffin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A story is told as much by silence as by speech. — Susan Griffin

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

There is always time to make right what is wrong. — Susan Griffin

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

Masculinity is a terrible problem, as we construe it and shape it. — Susan Griffin

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

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

I love that moment in writing when language falls short. There is something more there. A larger body. Even by the failure of words I begin to detect its dimensions. As I work the prose, shift the verbs, look for new adjectives, a different rhythm, syntax, something new begins to come to the surface. — Susan Griffin

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

To make love is to become like this infant again. We grope with our mouths toward the body of another being, whom we trust, who takes us in her arms. We rock together with this loved one. We move beyond speech. Our bodies move past all the controls we have learned. We cry out in ecstasy, in feeling. We are back in a natural world before culture tried to erase our experience of nature. In this world, to touch another is to express love; there is no idea apart from feeling, and no feeling which does not ring through our bodies and our souls at once. — Susan Griffin

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

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

In my lifetime I have seen democracy begin to expand, not only to include those who have been excluded, but to provide a listening arena, a vocabulary, an intelligent reception for stories that have been buried. Not just stories of the disenfranchised and the marginalized, but marginalized and disenfranchised histories even in the lives of the accepted and the privileged. — Susan Griffin

My father learned his disinterest under the guise of masculinity. Boys don't cry. There are whole disciplines, institutions, rubrics in our culture which serve as categories of denial.
Science is such a category. The torture and death that Heinrich Himmler found disturbing to witness became acceptable to him when it fell under this rubric. He liked to watch the scientific experiments in the concentration camps — Susan Griffin

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

Society, like nature, is one body, really. — Susan Griffin

Gender is a way to hide from the simple truth we all tell: 'Hey, I'm here, I have a body.' — Susan Griffin

The hope you feel when you are in love is not necessarily for anything in particular. Love brings something inside you to life. Perhaps it is just the full dimensionality of your own capacity to feel that returns. In this state you think no impediment can be large enough to interrupt your passion. The feeling spills beyond the object of your love to color the whole world. The mood is not unlike the mood of revolutionaries in the first blush of victory, at the dawn of hope. Anything seems possible. And in the event of failure, it will be this taste of possibility that makes disillusion bitter. — Susan Griffin

Is it a coincidence that stories from the private life became more popular just as the grand hope for public redemption through revolution was beginning to sour? I witnessed a similar shift in taste in my own time. In the 1960s, while a hopeful vision of a just society arose again, countless poems and plays concerning politics and public life were written, read, and performed. But after the hope diminished and public life seemed less and less trustworthy, this subject was less in style. — Susan Griffin

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

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

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

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

War starts in the mind, not in the body. — Susan Griffin

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

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

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

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

Waging war is not a primary physical need. — Susan Griffin

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

Lately I have come to believe that an as yet undiscovered human need and even a property of matter is the desire for revelation. The truth within us has a way of coming out despite all conscious efforts to conceal it. I have heard stories from those in the generation after the war, all speaking of the same struggle to ferret truth from the silence of their parents so that they themselves could begin to live. — Susan Griffin

Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope emerges for the future ... Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in our hands. — Susan Griffin

We keep secrets from ourselves that all along we know. — Susan Griffin

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

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

Every time I deny myself I commit a kind of suicide. — Susan Griffin

We are the bird's eggs. Bird's eggs, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, cows, sheep, we are caterpillars; we are leaves of ivy and springs of wildflower. We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak. But we hear. — Susan Griffin

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

There is always a time to make right what is wrong. — Susan Griffin

[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

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

There is a circle of humanity, he told me, and I can feel its warmth. But I am forever outside. — Susan Griffin

This is often the way one moves into the future. For what you begin to see, there is no ready language. If you were to remain silent, listen, perhaps in response you might be able to move in a new way. Glide into it slowly, aware of every slight difference, skin and cells intelligent, reading. But trained as you are in certain regimens, chances are you proceed directly according to the old patterns, trying again what was tried before. — Susan Griffin

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

I grew up right near Hollywood, and I wanted to be a filmmaker. — Susan Griffin

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

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

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

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

Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope. — Susan Griffin

Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record. — Susan Griffin

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

Many a business depends for its success on some girl who is smart enough to see to it that her boss gets his work done, who sometimes even does his work for him, who keeps everybody satisfied and happy, and who has enough foresight to control new situations as they occur. How do you go about finding such a jewel? ... RICHARD and RUBIN, How to Select and Direct the Office Staff — Susan Griffin

Self-reflection is a desire felt by the body, as well as the soul. As dancers, healers, and saints all know, when you turn your attention toward even the simplest physical process - breath, the small movements of the eyes, the turning of a foot in midair - what might have seemed dull matter suddenly awakens. — Susan Griffin

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. — Susan Griffin

The ability for a woman to be free is connected with her ability to love another woman. — Susan Griffin

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