Quotes from Susan Griffin

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

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.

There is a circle of humanity, he told me, and I can feel its warmth. But I am forever outside.

Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope emerges for the future...Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in our hands.

How many small decisions accumulate to form a habit? What a multitude of decisions, made by others, in other times, must shape our lives now.

The body remembers who we are supposed to be. And in this there is grief.

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 relationship with actuality. And thus language and culture begin to exist entirely independently of nature.

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

There is always time to make right what is wrong.

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

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.

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.

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.

Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.

To grasp the truth is a delicate gesture, like taking a hand in greeting, a lightness of touch is needed if one is to feel the presence of another being.

At the center of/ all my sorrows/ I have felt a presence/ that was not mine alone.

My father learned his disinterest under the guise of masculinity. Boys don't cry. There are whole disciplines, institutions, rubrics in our culture which serve as categories of denial. Science is such a category. The torture and death that Heinrich Himmler found disturbing to witness became acceptable to him when it fell under this rubric. He liked to watch the scientific experiments in the concentration camps

A story is told as much by silence as by speech.

Waging war is not a primary physical need.

War starts in the mind, not in the body.

I grew up right near Hollywood, and I wanted to be a filmmaker.

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.

Ordinary women attempt to change our bodies to resemble a pornographic ideal. Ordinary women construct a false self and come to hate this self.