Quote

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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Susan Griffin
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: January 26
Author
Environmentalist
Feminist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Susan Griffin
Live
Slave
Imitate
Feel
Image
Relatively
Feels
Female
Obliged
Kind
Masters
Powerless
Position
Slaves
Force
Politically
Culture
Required
Implicit
Women
Master
Economically

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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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But still, the other voice, the intuitive, returns, like grass forcing its way through concrete.
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A story is told as much by silence as by speech.
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Every time I deny myself I commit a kind of suicide.
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Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us.
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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.
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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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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.
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Waging war is not a primary physical need.
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... This is the paradox of vision: Sharp perception softens our existence in the world.
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