Quotes by Susan Griffin

“The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.”

“The authorities did not wish to confront those citizens with the sight of the dead. Finally bodies were dumped unidentified into mass graves. Like plutonium waste which we would like to forget, the...”

“The telling and the hearing of a story is not a simple act. The one who tells must reach down into deeper layers of the self, reviving old feelings, reviewing the past. Whatever is retrieved is rew...”

“The ability for a woman to be free is connected with her ability to love another woman.”

“When we hear that "war" is made for "peace", or that "pain" is sought for "pleasure" or that "brutality" helps one "feel", in our minds, language ceases to describe reality. Words lose their direct...”

“In this sense, we can render the false meaning of catharsis which occurs in pornography with a different meaning than the catharsis we associate with Aristotle's definition of tragedy. For in the t...”

“He says that woman speaks with nature. That she hears voices from under the earth. That wind blows in her ears and trees whisper to her. That the dead sing through her mouth and the cries of infant...”

“In the cage is the lion. She paces with her memories. Her body is a record of her past. As she moves back and forth, one may see it all: the lean frame, the muscular legs, the paw enclosing long sh...”

“Her womb from her body. Separation. Her clitoris from her vulva. Cleaving. Desire from her body. We were told that bodies rising to heaven lose their vulvas, their ovaries, wombs, that her body in ...”

“We heard of this woman who was out of control. We heard that she was led by her feelings. That her emotions were violent. That she was impetuous. That she violated tradition and overrode convention...”

“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, fort...”

“His insights have come to him through a crack in the veneer of civilization, which was also a crack in his own soul. He had the courage to look in this direction.”

“What was it like then to witness the transformation wrought by this construction? A geometric idea of precision suddenly imposed on a landscape, lived on and in for centuries. The land itself like ...”

“The world of fundamental religion does not recognize even the slightest variation in meaning should this meaning fall outside its own definition of truth.”

“This is often the way one moves into the future. For what you begin to see, there is no ready language. If you were to remain silent, listen, perhaps in response you might be able to move in a new ...”

“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 tast...”

“Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.”

“I am beginning to believe that we know everything, that all history, including the history of each family, is part of us, such that, when we hear any secret revealed, a secret about a grandfather, ...”

“I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from each other, the earth, ourselves.”

“What at one time one refuses to see never vanishes but returns, again and again, in many forms.”