A Chorus of Stones Quotes

“The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“ There is a circle of humanity, he told me, and I can feel its warmth. But I am forever outside. ”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“[P]erhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“The body remembers who we are supposed to be. And in this there is grief.”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“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, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“The world of fundamental religion does not recognize even the slightest variation in meaning should this meaning fall outside its own definition of truth.”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from each other, the earth, ourselves.”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“What at one time one refuses to see never vanishes but returns, again and again, in many forms.”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“I am beginning to believe that we know everything, that all history, including the history of each family, is part of us, such that, when we hear any secret revealed, a secret about a grandfather, or an uncle, or a secret about the battle of Dresden in 1945, our lives are made suddenly clearer to us, as the unnatural heaviness of unspoken truth is dispersed. For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“The hard surface of the stone is impervious to nothing in the end. The heat of the sun leaves evidence of daylight. Each drop of rain changes the form; even the wind and the air itself, invisible to our eyes, etches its presence. … All history is taken in by stones.”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“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, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“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, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“The telling and the hearing of a story is not a simple act. The one who tells must reach down into deeper layers of the self, reviving old feelings, reviewing the past. Whatever is retrieved is reworked into a new form, one that narrates events and gives the listener a path through these events that leads to some fragment of wisdom. The one who hears takes the story in, even to a place not visible or conscious to the mind, yet there. In this inner place a story from another life suffers a subtle change. As it enters the memory of the listener it is augmented by reflection, by other memories, and even the body hearing and responding in the moment of the telling. By such transmissions, consciousness is woven.”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“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, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“What was it like then to witness the transformation wrought by this construction? A geometric idea of precision suddenly imposed on a landscape, lived on and in for centuries. The land itself like a body submitted to military discipline. Or like a mind, tutored along certain acceptable pathways, so that finally all that lies outside certain avenues of thought begins to assume an air of unreality.
The land of course is still there. Only now it has receded into the background. It is what you see in your peripheral vision as you speed down the highway. The complexity of it, the intricate presence of it, has been reduced now to a single word, jungle. If once you breathed its breath or slept surrounded by its dark or wakened with its light, you no longer remember. You tell yourself life has improved. The jungle is in the past. To enter it is to stray from the path, or to be pulled down into some unknown depth. It is an exotic place, intriguing but also unpredictable, uncontrolled, threatening the well-paved order of existence.”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“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, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“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, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“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, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War

“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.”
― Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War