Susan Griffin

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

The authorities did not wish to confront those citizens with the sight of the dead. Finally bodies were dumped unidentified into mass graves. Like plutonium waste which we would like to forget, these bodies had become poisonous.

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

My father learned his disinterest under the guise of masculinity. Boys don__ 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

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

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

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

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

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

One can find traces of every life in each life.

It is a hot summer day in Tennessee in the midst of the sixth decade of this century. The girl has climbed the fence to get to the swimming hole she has visited so many summers of her life in the time before this part of the land was enclosed. She stands now at the edge of it. Her body is sticky with heat. The surface of the water moves slightly. Sunlight shimmers and dances in a green reflection that seems as she stares at it to pull her in even before her skin is wet with it. Drops of water on the infant__ head. All the body immersed for baptism. Do these images come to her as she sinks into the coolness? The washing of hands before Sunday__ midday meal. All our sins washed away. Water was once the element for purification. But at the bottom of this pool, There is no telling what is there now. This is what the girl__ father will say to her finally: corroded cans of chemical waste, some radioactive substances. That was why they put the fence there. She is not thinking of that now. The words have not yet been said, and so for her no trouble exists here. The water holds up her body. She is weightless in this fulsome element, the waves her body makes embracing her with their own benediction. Beneath her in the shadowy green, she feels the depth of the pond. In this coolness as the heat mercifully abates, her mind is set free, to dream as the water dreams.

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.

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.