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.

— Susan Griffin

In this sense, we can render the false meaning of catharsis which occurs in pornography with a different meaning than the catharsis we associate with Aristotle's definition of tragedy. For in the tragedy, we weep, grieve and feel pity. We are brought to feeling, we experience both meaning and sensation at the same time, tremble in our bodies and our souls. Thus, we weep over the death of Iphigenia, of Tristan and Result, of Madame Bovary. In experiencing these feelings, we have tapped a part of ourselves which had perhaps been quiet for some time. Which indeed, in this stillness, we were not certain was even there. Or had even forgotten. And thus, when we weep at this tragic playing out before our eyes of a drama which touches our hearts, a part of ourselves we had left in shadow comes back to us and is named and is lived. But pornographic catharsis moves from altogether different needs. For, we know, one does not weep over the death of Justine. One does not feel at all. Rather, one experiences only sensation and mastery. If there is a vulnerable part of oneself that would weep, this vulnerability is projected onto the body of a woman who is punished, and is destroyed there. And so we cease, in this projection, to recognize this vulnerability as a part of ourselves. Rather than reclaim a feeling, or own a part of ourselves once more, we disown ourselves. What pornography calls "catharsis" leads to denial and not to knowledge.

— Susan Griffin

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.

— Susan Griffin

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

— Susan Griffin

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’s 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’s 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’s 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.

— Susan Griffin

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

My father learned his disinterest under the guise of masculinity. Boys don’t 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

— Susan Griffin

One can find traces of every life in each life.

— Susan Griffin

Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.

— Susan Griffin

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

— Susan Griffin