Top 40 Susan Griffin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Susan Griffin

2. “There is always a time to make right what is wrong.”

— Susan Griffin

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

— Susan Griffin

4. “We are nature. We are nature seeing nature. The red-winged blackbird flies in us.”

— Susan Griffin

5. “I know I am made from this earth, as my mother’s hands were made from this earth, as her dreams came from this earth and all that I know, I know in this earth, the body of the bird, this pen, this paper, these hands, this tongue speaking, all that I know speaks to me through this earth.”

— Susan Griffin

6. “Even in the grimmest of circumstances, a shift in perspective can create startling change.”

— Susan Griffin

7. “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.”

— Susan Griffin

8. “What always seems miraculous is when aesthetic necessities yield an insight which otherwise I would have missed.”

— Susan Griffin

9. “It is a grief over the fate of the Earth that contains within it a joyful hope, that we might reclaim this Earth.”

— Susan Griffin

10. “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.”

— Susan Griffin

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

— Susan Griffin

12. “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.”

— Susan Griffin

13. “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.”

— Susan Griffin

14. “A story is told as much by silence as by speech.”

— Susan Griffin

15. “We keep secrets from ourselves that all along we know.”

— Susan Griffin

16. “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.”

— Susan Griffin

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

— Susan Griffin

18. “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.”

— Susan Griffin

19. “One can find traces of every life in each life.”

— Susan Griffin

20. “War starts in the mind, not in the body.”

— Susan Griffin

21. “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.”

— Susan Griffin

22. “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.”

— Susan Griffin

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

— Susan Griffin

24. “Society, like nature, is one body, really.”

— Susan Griffin

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

— Susan Griffin

26. “Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.”

— Susan Griffin

27. “Telling a story of illness, one pulls a thread through a narrow opening flanked on one side by shame and the other by trivia.”

— Susan Griffin

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Susan Griffin

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

— Susan Griffin

30. “Every time I deny myself I commit a kind of suicide.”

— Susan Griffin

31. “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.”

— Susan Griffin

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

— Susan Griffin

33. “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.”

— Susan Griffin

34. “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.”

— Susan Griffin

35. “But still, the other voice, the intuitive, returns, like grass forcing its way through concrete.”

— Susan Griffin

36. “I think artists can go to a level of vision that can often save us from a situation which seems to have no solution whatsoever.”

— Susan Griffin

37. “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.”

— Susan Griffin

38. “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.”

— Susan Griffin

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

— Susan Griffin

40. “Waging war is not a primary physical need.”

— Susan Griffin

41. “Lately I have come to believe that an as yet undiscovered human need and even a property of matter is the desire for revelation. The truth within us has a way of coming out despite all conscious efforts to conceal it. I have heard stories from those in the generation after the war, all speaking of the same struggle to ferret truth from the silence of their parents so that they themselves could begin to live.”

— Susan Griffin

42. “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.”

— Susan Griffin

43. “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.”

— Susan Griffin

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

— Susan Griffin