Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Susan Griffin
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: January 26
Author
Environmentalist
Feminist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Susan Griffin
Anyone
History
Away
Else
Earth
Different
Abandonment
Split
Splits

More quotes by Susan Griffin

Image
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
Image
Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.
Susan Griffin
Image
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
Image
What always seems miraculous is when aesthetic necessities yield an insight which otherwise I would have missed.
Susan Griffin
Image
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
Image
The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.
Susan Griffin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Waging war is not a primary physical need.
Susan Griffin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Every time I deny myself I commit a kind of suicide.
Susan Griffin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.
Susan Griffin