SUSAN GRIFFIN

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Society, like nature, is one body, really.

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

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.'

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

We keep secrets from ourselves that all along we know.

This earth is my sister; I love her daily grace, her silent daring, and how loved I am. How we admire this strength in each other, all that we have lost, all that we have suffered, all that we know: We are stunned by this beauty, and I do not forget: what she is to me, what I am to her.

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

Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.

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.

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.

Yes we are devilish; that is true we cackle. Yes we are dark like the soil and wild like the animals. And we turn to each other and stare into this darkness. We find it beautiful. We find this darkness irresistible. We cease all hiding.

we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature.

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

Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.