Quote

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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Susan Griffin
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: January 26
Author
Environmentalist
Feminist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Susan Griffin
Writing
Language
Rhythm
Detect
Even
Fall
Begins
Adjectives
Work
Moments
Surface
Verbs
Something
Body
Begin
Shift
Love
Look
Failure
Dimensions
Come
Short
Falls
Looks
Moment
Prose
Different
Words
Larger
Syntax

More quotes by Susan Griffin

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Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.
Susan Griffin
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What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.
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One can find traces of every life in each life.
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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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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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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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A story is told as much by silence as by speech.
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.
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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.
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And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference.
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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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What always seems miraculous is when aesthetic necessities yield an insight which otherwise I would have missed.
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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.
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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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Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.
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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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
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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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But still, the other voice, the intuitive, returns, like grass forcing its way through concrete.
Susan Griffin
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War starts in the mind, not in the body.
Susan Griffin