Quotes by Filmmakers - Page 34

Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one.
Susan Sontag
It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention.
Susan Sontag
Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.
Susan Sontag
Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.
Susan Sontag
No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
Susan Sontag
Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)
Susan Sontag
All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.
Susan Sontag
I believe my life has a value, and i don't want to waste it thinking about clothing.I don't want to think about what i will wear in the morning. Truly, can you imagine anything more boring than fashion?
Michael Crichton
You'll never be alone if you’ve got a book.
Al Pacino
My mother was an avid reader...She loved books about romance. Books that took place in faraway places and times. Stories with costumes...
Adriana Trigiani
A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.
Richard Flanagan
People have often told me that one of their strongest childhood memories is the scent of their grandmother's house. I never knew my grandmothers, but I could always count of the Bookmobile.
Adriana Trigiani
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Susan Sontag
[W]hat I like best is staying home and reading. Being rich is not about how many homes you own. It’s the freedom to pick up any book you want without looking at the price and wondering whether you can afford it.
John Waters
Teenagers read millions of books every year. They read for entertainment and for education. They read because of school assignments and pop culture fads.
Sherman Alexie
I think it is good that books still exist, but they do make me sleepy.
Frank Zappa
Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.
Michael Crichton
You have to remember that it is impossible to commit a crime while reading a book.
John Waters
I even love the smell of books.
Adriana Trigiani
A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.
Richard Flanagan
His hands were weak and shaking from carrying far too many books from the bookshop. It was the best feeling.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
It wasn't until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.
John Waters
Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own it's the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it.
John Waters
My library is an archive of longings.
Susan Sontag
If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!
John Waters
Like two old philosophers, Ashvin and James spoke of the ruin of their lives, their unfulfilled needs, their unanswered prayers and ultimately they were seduced by the phantom call to death by suicide its science, its poetry, its violence, its art.
Peter Akinti
She knew half of the correspondents had broken under the excruciating pressure. And the other half who said they had made it, simply lied. She also knew there was a good chance she would too. But it was still worth it. Because if Viola wanted anything approaching a deeper meaning, she knew it existed in moments filled with injustice and cruelty. That’s where true human nature lay for her. Not because of the ferocity itself but because of what came with it, true human heart and compassion.
Piotr Ryczko
In the end, it became clear that all scientists were participants in a participatory universe which did not allow anyone to be a mere observer.
Michael Crichton
Straight linearity, which we have come to take for granted in everything from physics to fiction, simply does not exist. Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world. Real life isn't a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way. That's a deep truth about the structure of our universe. But, for some reason, we insist behaving as if it were not true.
Michael Crichton
A scientist shouldn't be asked to judge the economic and moral value of his work. All we should ask the scientist to do is find the truth and then not keep it from anyone.
Harmony Korine
Life seemed ideal to him right then, and he was happy for the first time in a long time, and it felt like the sun was shining from his heart." - from the novel Brainjob by David Sloma.
David Sloma
I remember one bobcat they had in here - now bobcats are an endangered species in this neck of the woods - they'd caught it somewhere and they must have put that cat through a dozen rounds of burn experiments before they finally determined that it was utterly useless to them. Like an empty beer can. And then you know what they did to it? Claudius was late for a lunch date so rather thanput the destroyed but still breathing animal to sleep, he picked it up by its hind legs and simply smashed its head against a wall repeatedly until it was dead. How can I forget it: I was the one told to clean up the mess. The head dented in. The eyes slowly closing. The once proud claws hanging down, stunned and lifeless, the utter senselessness of it all, and the hate, a hatred that was consummated in me which is as dangerous a hormone, or chemical, or portion of the brain, as any neutron bomb. Except that I didnt know how to explode. I was like a computer without a keyboard, a bird without wings. Roaring inside. I wanted to kill that man. To do unto others what they had done unto me. I was that bobcat, you better believe it.
Michael Tobias
I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.
Michael Crichton
This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right.
Michael Crichton
Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.
Michael Crichton
it is a federal system of sadistic torture, vivisection, and animal genocide, which has been carried on for decades under the fraudulent guise of respectable medical research. And nobody on the outside knows, or wants to know, or is willing to find out. My parents, my friends, my teachers, wouldnt listen to me, or suggested that if it was bothering me that much I just had to quit the job. Just like that. As if that would have solved anything. As if I could ever live with such cowardice. You can't imagine, or maybe you can, how many people are convinced - without knowing the first thing about it - Animal research is essential. Americans have been hopelessly brainwashed on this issue. The animal rights people, by and large, acknowledge the essential futility of trying to change the system. So they address the smaller issues, fighting for legislation which would provide one extra visit per week to the labs by a custodian of the US dept of agriculture. Or demanding that a squirrel monkey be given an extra 12 square inches in his holding pen, before being led to the slaughter. That sort of thing. For whomever, and whatever it's worth, I hope my little write up is clear. I dont have the guts to do whats necessary. I pray there's someone out there who does. God help all of us.
Michael Tobias
I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
Michael Crichton
It's a bit like sympathetic magic in a way: the usual Western presumption that 'primitive' rituals mimic what they desire to achieve--that phallic objects might be believed to increase male potency and playacting rainfall might somehow bring it about. I am suspicious of such obvious connections and I suspect that the connections among things, people, and processes can be equally irrational. I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.
David Byrne
They didn't understand what they were doing.I'm afraid that will be on the tombstone of the human race.
Michael Crichton
If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.
Peter Ustinov
Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.
Michael Crichton
Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other.
Michael Crichton
But now science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world any more. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways---air, and water, and land---because of ungovernable science.
Michael Crichton
A hundred years from now, people will look back on us and laugh. They'll say, 'You know what people used to believe? They believed in photons and electrons. Can you imagine anything so silly?' They'll have a good laugh, because by then there will be newer better fantasies... And meanwhile, you feel the way the boat moves? That's the sea. That's real. You smell the salt in the air? You feel the sunlight on your skin? That's all real. Life is wonderful. It's a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn't really anything else.
Michael Crichton
You know what's wrong with scientific power? It's a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are.
Michael Crichton
Discovery is always rape of the natural world. Always.
Michael Crichton
God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates man, man kills God, man brings back dinosaurs.
Michael Crichton
Do you know what we call opinion in the absence of evidence? We call it prejudice.
Michael Crichton
The thing Tedros liked about girls is that they always started the conversation. Most of the time, his job was just to listen, ask questions, and try to understand what in God’s name was going on in their complicated little heads. He rarely had any idea what girls were talking about or why they made everything so torturous in their logic, so playing the role of the strong, silent type usually gave him time to catch up.
Soman Chainani
[Or perhaps my friends should have realized that they shouldn't have left behind the FRICKING REASON FOR THEIR PROTEST!And that thought just cracked me up.]It was like my friends had walked over the backs of baby seals in order to get to the beach where they could protest against the slaughter of baby seals.
Sherman Alexie
Will you quit shouting and let me bleed in peace!
Ransom Riggs
Are you scared of going in to see the raghnaid [the council]?” asked a gray female pup. “Are you cag mag [crazy]? If a bear was his Milk Giver, you think he’s scared of the raghnaid?
Kathryn Lasky
You Sure this is it?" I said. "It looks empty.""Empty? No way, there's loads of shit in there," worm replied
Ransom Riggs
Cara: *Flies*Gen: What? I don't have wings!Cara: Ofcourse not! You're a boy.
Jim Henson
Have they built cities on the moon?" another boy asked hopefully."We left some garbage and a flag there in the sixties, but thats about it.
Ransom Riggs
Otulissa swelled up to twice her normal size. 'Well, SPRINK ON YOUR SPRONK!
Kathryn Lasky
I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is "In 15 minutes everybody will be famous.
Andy Warhol
Somebody dies and people eat your food. Funny how that works.
Sherman Alexie
When they throw the water on the witch, she says, “Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness”. That line inspired my life. I sometimes say it to myself before I go to sleep, like a prayer.
John Waters
A man touched me: his hand... my thigh.I touched him too: my fist... his jaw.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt