Susan Griffin Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
Mother
I write home
I am alone and
give me my body back.

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
The way of the river is sacred, and this grove of trees is sacred, and we ourselves, we tell you, are sacred.

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

Susan Griffin