Quotes from Susan Griffin

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.

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.

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.

There is always a time to make right what is wrong.

Masculinity is a terrible problem, as we construe it and shape it.

I think we actually punish children out of their relationship with their bodies... we categorically separate mind and body and emotion and intellect.

Far more frightening than the thought of dying was the experience of erasure already occurring in my life. My fear of becoming someone who did not count.

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

Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us.

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.

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

Gender is a way to hide from the simple truth we all tell: 'Hey, I'm here, I have a body.'

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

What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.

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.

For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.

If these pages are thick with death, think of the battlefield. Corpses in different stages of decay, the slowly dying, moments of death exist around you everywhere. Who are you? You are among the living, but can you be certain?

I've seen enough change in my lifetime to know that despair is not only self-defeating, it is unrealistic.

The story of one life cannot be told separately from the story of other lives. Who are we? The question is not simple. What we call the self is part of a larger matrix of relationship and society. Had we been born to a different family, in a different time, to a different world, we would not be the same. All the lives that surround us are in us.

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.

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 way. Glide into it slowly, aware of every slight difference, skin and cells intelligent, reading. But trained as you are in certain regimens, chances are you proceed directly according to the old patterns, trying again what was tried before.

Many a business depends for its success on some girl who is smart enough to see to it that her boss gets his work done, who sometimes even does his work for him, who keeps everybody satisfied and happy, and who has enough foresight to control new situations as they occur. How do you go about finding such a jewel? … RICHARD and RUBIN, How to Select and Direct the Office Staff

And yet, though in history the movement to restore eros to our idea of human nature and the movement for political liberation are parts of the same vision, we must make a distinction between the libertine's idea of liberty, 'to do as one likes,' and a vision of human 'liberation.

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, these bodies had become poisonous.