Suite for Barbara Loden
Nathalie Léger
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Someone who knew Barbara Loden well told me: 'She said it is easy to be avant-garde but it is really difficult to tell a simple story well.”
“... from the outside what can you see of the deepest despair?”
“I prefer what Louis-Ferdinand Céline says: when you've reached the very end of all things, and sorrow itself no longer offers an answer, then you must return to the company of others, no matter who they are.”
“It seems to be becoming increasingly difficult to accept that we don’t always know exactly where we are, and by extension it is becoming increasingly difficult to know exactly where we are.”
“I went to see Frederick Wiseman, the pioneer of interview-free, commentary-free, documentation-free documentary – a filmmaker who glides so slowly with his camera into the heart of what he is filming that everyone forgets that he is there. I told him about all the difficulties I found myself up against in trying to piece together the life of Barbara Loden. And he said to me – this man, who never works on anything that isn’t real, said to me quite calmly – ‘Make it up. All you have to do is make it up.”
“I was reminded that only in unfamiliar bedrooms do we perceive with such clarity the true nature of our existence---true because astray---only away from our own bedroom, from the room that I longed for ever moment of my trip---how I longed to be there, to slip into it---in the persistently unyielding space of a deserted place that just won't be appropriated.”
“Flaubert writing to Louise Colet in 1853: Everything we invent is truth, do not doubt it. Poetry is as precise as geometry. The conclusion is as good as its deduction, and, at a certain point, we no longer deceive ourselves in matters of the soul.”
“Americans hate lies because they are themselves the subjects of a perpetual fiction.”
“The hardest thing is the words, how long it takes, he says, taking a sip of his drink, the concentration you need to work out what goes with what, how to put together a single sentence. I had no idea that shaping a sentence was so difficult, all the possible ways there are to do i, even the simplest sentence, as soon as it's written down, all the hesitations, all the problems. (Mickey Mantle describing writing his memoir.)”
“Marguerite Duras spoke of glory. Talking about Barbara and the last scene in the film, she said, ‘It’s as if at this point in the film she’s found a way of making holy the very thing that she has tried to show as a kind of degradation. I see a kind of glory there, a very powerful glory, very violent, very profound.”
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Book Keywords:
appearances, reality, words, simplicity, poetry, truth, hopelessness, surfaces, writing, despair, complexity, fiction, storytelling, language, homesick, support, sentences, isolation, sorrow, company, connection, creation, composition, craft, invention, hotels, bedrooms
