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

Susan Griffin

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Susan Griffin
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: January 26
Author
Environmentalist
Feminist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Susan Griffin
Existence
World
Softens
Awe
Sharp
Paradox
Perception
Vision
Seeing

More quotes by Susan Griffin

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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
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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
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A story is told as much by silence as by speech.
Susan Griffin
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The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.
Susan Griffin
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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
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Waging war is not a primary physical need.
Susan Griffin
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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
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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
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Every time I deny myself I commit a kind of suicide.
Susan Griffin
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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
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War starts in the mind, not in the body.
Susan Griffin
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Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us.
Susan Griffin
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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
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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
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There is always a time to make right what is wrong.
Susan Griffin
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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
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But still, the other voice, the intuitive, returns, like grass forcing its way through concrete.
Susan Griffin
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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
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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
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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