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
beautiful dark animal
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.
yield insight aesthetic
What always seems miraculous is when aesthetic necessities yield an insight which otherwise I would have missed.
sex moving past
To make love is to become like this infant again. We grope with our mouths toward the body of another being, whom we trust, who takes us in her arms. We rock together with this loved one. We move beyond speech. Our bodies move past all the controls we have learned. We cry out in ecstasy, in feeling. We are back in a natural world before culture tried to erase our experience of nature. In this world, to touch another is to express love; there is no idea apart from feeling, and no feeling which does not ring through our bodies and our souls at once.
book argument determinism
In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism.
decision shapes habit
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.
play hopeful style
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.
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.
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.
There is always a time to make right what is wrong.
average radical-feminism differences
And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference.
men age chivalry
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.
fall writing adjectives
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.
atmosphere secret weight
Before a secret is told, one can often feel the weight of it in the atmosphere.
voice intuition way
But still, the other voice, the intuitive, returns, like grass forcing its way through concrete.