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Every time I deny myself I commit a kind of suicide.

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
Self
Every
Kind
Time
Suicide
Commit
Deny

More quotes by 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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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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Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.
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 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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Society, like nature, is one body, really.
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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Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us.
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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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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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
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A story is told as much by silence as by speech.
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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Waging war is not a primary physical need.
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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What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.
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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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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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