Susan Griffin
Susan Griffin
Susan Griffinis an eco-feminist author. She describes her work as "draw connections between the destruction of nature, the diminishment of women and racism, and trac the causes of war to denial in both private and public life." In addition to her many published writings, Griffin co-wrote and narrated the award-winning 1990 documentary, Berkeley in the Sixties. She received a MacArthur grant for Peace and International Cooperation, an NEA Fellowship, and an Emmy Award for the play Voices...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
atmosphere secret weight
Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.
modern-woman roles virtue
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.
passion love-is thinking
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.
perspective serious circumstances
Even in the grimmest of circumstances, a shift in perspective can create startling change.
taken rain eye
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.
grief fate earth
It is a grief over the fate of the Earth that contains within it a joyful hope, that we might reclaim this Earth.
intelligent vocabulary listening
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.
yield insight aesthetic
What always seems miraculous is when aesthetic necessities yield an insight which otherwise I would have missed.
suicide self kind
Every time I deny myself I commit a kind of suicide.
secret knows
We keep secrets from ourselves that all along we know.
culture female kind
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.
philosophy mean body
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.
museums meditation painting
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.
girl spring flower
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.