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
Something
Body
Begin
Shift
Love
Look
Failure
Dimensions
Come
Short
Falls
Looks
Moment
Prose
Different
Words
Larger
Syntax
Writing
Language
Rhythm
Detect
Even
Fall
Begins
Adjectives
Work
Moments
Surface
Verbs

More quotes by 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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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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Waging war is not a primary physical need.
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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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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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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Society, like nature, is one body, really.
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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War starts in the mind, not in the body.
Susan Griffin
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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.
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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One can find traces of every life in each life.
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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What always seems miraculous is when aesthetic necessities yield an insight which otherwise I would have missed.
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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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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Every time I deny myself I commit a kind of suicide.
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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What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.
Susan Griffin