Quote

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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Susan Griffin
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: January 26
Author
Environmentalist
Feminist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Susan Griffin
Illness
Opening
Shame
Telling
Side
Trivia
Sides
Pulls
Story
Thread
Stories
Narrow

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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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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Society, like nature, is one body, really.
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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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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A story is told as much by silence as by speech.
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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The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.
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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War starts in the mind, not in the body.
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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One can find traces of every life in each life.
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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Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.
Susan Griffin