Quotable Quotes
Posted: Sat Oct 19, 2013 7:00 pm
"Ideals without technique are a mess; technique without ideals is a menace." - Karl Llewellyn"Memory--a persuasive witness speaking movingly to the camera--is what filmmakers love. It is the past carried in bodily form into the present. Filmmakers like to pretend that memory is synonymous with history, but history, I have come to realize, is the enemy of memory. Memory is a living thing. It exists in the minds of living human beings and cannot be separated from them without becoming something else. Memory constantly rearranges the past to make sense of the present. It is as much about who we are now as who we were then. "History, too, rearranges the past to make sense of the present, but historians work with dead things, things not so malleable as memory. We base our faith on dead things--documents, artifacts--that are supposed to change even as interpretations change. Our faith is the footnote. History, while very much an act of creation and interpretation in the present, is far less free than memory. It is anchored to the dead stuff that the past leaves among us." - Richard White"Suffering is overrated. It doesn't teach you anything." - Bill Veeck