Susan Griffin Quotes

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

It is only in the light of the inescapable fact of death that a person can adequately engage and enter upon the mysterious fact of life.

We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, "I wish I hadn't been born?" Once you're born you'll have to die, now is that funny or sad?

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

I don't know if my work is a concerted effort to make kids sad! But life and death go hand in hand. It's our condition as human beings.

There are only three events in a man's life; birth, life, and death; he is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.

We all have two things in common, no matter who we are: We were born and we are going to die.

Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.

I'm interested in time, fame, death, beauty, truth, all those things.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them.

Initially, I studied philosophy, because it claimed to give you answers to the meaning of existence, but it didn't: It was basically a semantics game.

Who does understand life?

If you don't ponder the end of the world on a regular basis, I don't think you're really human.

I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood - sex and the dead.

All of my work is sort of fed by a question, a need to understand the world and why the world is what it is.

We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain. We do not remember the red roots whence we rose, but we know that we rose and walked, that after a while we shall lie down again.

To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death.

Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. Death is the opposite of birth.

I really believe that 'Saw' makes us stop and think and question our motives and what we're doing here on Earth.

Sexuality itself means mortality - equally for both man and woman.

For in the works of Robert Burns we see the whole cosmos of man's experience and emotion, from zenith to nadir, from birth until death.

One idea I explore in my stand-up show is whether, if you try looking at the universe rationally and avoid coping mechanisms like mysticism or religion, you can still be happy knowing you are going to die after a brief time on this spinning ball.