Quote

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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Susan Griffin
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: January 26
Author
Environmentalist
Feminist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Susan Griffin
Women
Ideal
Body
Attempt
Come
Bodies
Self
False
Ideals
Pornographic
Ordinary
Resemble
Hate
Construct
Change
Constructs

More quotes by 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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... This is the paradox of vision: Sharp perception softens our existence in the world.
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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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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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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Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.
Susan Griffin
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One can find traces of every life in each life.
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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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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There is always a time to make right what is wrong.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference.
Susan Griffin