Susan Griffin Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

Culture Earth Language Vision Writing

We are the bird's eggs. Bird's eggs, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, cows, sheep, we are caterpillars; we are leaves of ivy and springs of wildflower. We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak. But we hear.

Susan Griffin

Girl, Spring, Flower

8 Copy quote
We are nature. We are nature seeing nature. The red-winged blackbird flies in us.

Susan Griffin

Healing, Red, Blackbirds

Susan Griffin (1983). “Made from this earth: an anthology of writings”, HarperCollins Publishers

7 Copy quote
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

Fall, Writing, Different

Susan Griffin (1996). “The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society”, Anchor

4 Copy quote
Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.

Susan Griffin

Revolutionary, Mediums, Poetry Is

15 Copy quote
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

Men, Age, Chivalry

8 Copy quote
Borrow a child and get on welfare.
Borrow a child and stay in the house all day with the child,
or go to the public park with the child, and take the child
to the welfare office and cry and say your man left you and
be humble and wear your dress and your smile, and don't talk
back.

Susan Griffin

Children, Humble, Motherhood

Susan Griffin (1976). “Like the iris of an eye”

9 Copy quote
It is a grief over the fate of the Earth that contains within it a joyful hope, that we might reclaim this Earth.

Susan Griffin

Grief, Fate, Earth

9 Copy quote
... This is the paradox of vision: Sharp perception softens our existence in the world.

Susan Griffin

Perception, Vision, World

Susan Griffin (1998). “Bending Home: Selected & New Poems, 1967-1998”

9 Copy quote
The hope you feel when you are in love is not necessarily for anything in particular. Love brings something inside you to life. Perhaps it is just the full dimensionality of your own capacity to feel that returns. In this state you think no impediment can be large enough to interrupt your passion. The feeling spills beyond the object of your love to color the whole world. The mood is not unlike the mood of revolutionaries in the first blush of victory, at the dawn of hope. Anything seems possible. And in the event of failure, it will be this taste of possibility that makes disillusion bitter.

Susan Griffin

Hope, Passion, Love Is

5 Copy 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

Change, Hate, Self

Susan Griffin (2015). “Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature”, p.170, Open Road Media

4 Copy quote
What always seems miraculous is when aesthetic necessities yield an insight which otherwise I would have missed.

Susan Griffin

Yield, Insight, Aesthetic

Susan Griffin (2015). “A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War”, p.191, Open Road Media

5 Copy quote
Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.

Susan Griffin

Atmosphere, Secret, Weight

Susan Griffin (2015). “A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War”, p.121, Open Road Media

11 Copy quote
The hard surface of the stone is impervious to nothing in the end. The heat of the sun leaves evidence of daylight. Each drop of rain changes the form; even the wind and the air itself, invisible to our eyes, etches its presence. … All history is taken in by stones.

Susan Griffin

Taken, Rain, Eye

Susan Griffin (2015). “A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War”, p.8, Open Road Media

4 Copy quote
Society, like nature, is one body, really.

Susan Griffin

Body

"A Writer's Debilitating Illness Becomes Her Lens on Society" by Judith Gingold, www.sfgate.com. August 8, 1999.

7 Copy quote
Although the many virtues that courtesans possessed were employed to defy circumstances, the role they played depended on the same circumstances over which they triumphed- conditions which to, fortunately for modern women, no longer exist.

Susan Griffin

Roles, Modern Woman, Virtue

Susan Griffin (2002). “The Book of the Courtesans: A Catalogue of Their Virtues”, p.17, Broadway Books

7 Copy quote
And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference.

Susan Griffin

Differences, Average, Radical Feminism

Susan Griffin (2015). “Rape: The Politics of Consciousness”, p.9, Open Road Media

32 Copy quote
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

Museums, Meditation, Painting

Susan Griffin (2015). “A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War”, p.246, Open Road Media

7 Copy quote
One can find traces of every life in each life.

Susan Griffin

Friendship

Susan Griffin (2015). “A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War”, p.124, Open Road Media

7 Copy quote
In my lifetime I have seen democracy begin to expand, not only to include those who have been excluded, but to provide a listening arena, a vocabulary, an intelligent reception for stories that have been buried. Not just stories of the disenfranchised and the marginalized, but marginalized and disenfranchised histories even in the lives of the accepted and the privileged.

Susan Griffin

Intelligent, Vocabulary, Listening

12 Copy quote
Is it a coincidence that stories from the private life became more popular just as the grand hope for public redemption through revolution was beginning to sour? I witnessed a similar shift in taste in my own time. In the 1960s, while a hopeful vision of a just society arose again, countless poems and plays concerning politics and public life were written, read, and performed. But after the hope diminished and public life seemed less and less trustworthy, this subject was less in style.

Susan Griffin

Play, Hopeful, Vision

4 Copy quote
In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism.

Susan Griffin

Book, Argument, Determinism

23 Copy quote
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

Country, Cracks, Language

Susan Griffin (1987). “Unremembered country: poems”, Copper Canyon Pr

4 Copy quote
Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight is a masterpiece of complex an nuanced thinking not only about a significant problem that faces women but about our culture. A very valuable book.

Susan Griffin

Book, Thinking, Unbearable

4 Copy quote
Waging war is not a primary physical need.

Susan Griffin

War, Needs, Waging War

4 Copy 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

Stories, Trivia, Sides

Susan Griffin (2011). “What Her Body Thought: A Journey Into the Shadows”, p.21, Harper Collins

4 Copy quote

You May Also Like:

Carolyn Merchant

Ti-Grace Atkinson

Charlene Spretnak

Susan Griffin

Follow

Born: January 26, 1943
Occupation: Author
Cite this Page: Citation

Popular Topics