Quote

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

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Susan Griffin
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: January 26
Author
Environmentalist
Feminist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Susan Griffin
Surprised
Words
Records
Page
Language
Lose
Appear
Write
Changed
Order
Loses
Older
Collapses
Writing
Control
Pages
Authentic
Time
Break
Exactly
Collapse
Dies
Record
Transformed
Sound
Follow

More quotes by Susan Griffin

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A story is told as much by silence as by speech.
Susan Griffin
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War starts in the mind, not in the body.
Susan Griffin
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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
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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
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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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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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But still, the other voice, the intuitive, returns, like grass forcing its way through concrete.
Susan Griffin
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Every time I deny myself I commit a kind of suicide.
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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What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.
Susan Griffin
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... This is the paradox of vision: Sharp perception softens our existence in the world.
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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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
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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
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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
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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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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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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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What always seems miraculous is when aesthetic necessities yield an insight which otherwise I would have missed.
Susan Griffin