Sarah Polley > Quotes

“So much of coming to terms with hard things from the past seems to be about believing our own accounts, having our memories confirmed by those who were there and honoured by those who weren’t. Why is it so hard for us to believe our own stories or begin to process them without corroborating witnesses appearing from the shadows of the past, or without people stepping forward with open arms when echoes of those stories present themselves again in the present?”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“Please don't ever apologize for having a reasonable response to something difficult.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“I know now that I will become weaker at what I avoid, that what I run towards will strengthen in me. I know to listen to my body, but not so much that I convince myself I can’t do things or that I can’t push myself.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“When she left, she left me searching the planet for anyone remotely like her.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“The past and present, I have come to realize, are in constant dialogue, acting upon one another in a kind of reciprocal pressure dance.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“The past was affecting how I moved through the world, while present life was affecting how the past moved through me.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“I can already sense how I will feel when I remember it years from now. I’m nostalgic for the present, mourning its passing even as it happens.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“You seem restless, in a kind of permanent way.”
― Sarah Polley

“There are certain people from whom you can immediately intuit that their fiercest expression of warmth is brutalizing honesty.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“Law professor Melanie Randall writes: “[The] limited appreciation of the nature of traumatic responses is, undoubtedly, an expression of a broader lack of understanding of, and information about, the complexities of human psychology and human behaviour within the legal system. This failure is particularly sharp in terms of legal responses to sexual assault, as it is entrenched within the many myths about sexual assault, including conceptions of authentic and credible (read ‘ideal’) victims.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“His love was all around the edges, but sometimes it was hard for both of us to see, I think.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“It can seem perplexing from the outside, this pull that many women experience to make things better for those who have hurt us. The impulse to smooth things over the keep ourselves safe...”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“I say that I didn’t know how much I missed my mother until I was pregnant. I say that I didn’t know how angry I was at her for dying. I say that now that I’ve lived two and a half years with my child, and felt the intensity of our subterranean, inexpressible, and indelible knowledge of each other, I’ve gone from feeling that eleven years with my mother was not very much, not nearly enough, to knowing that to feel adored and cherished by a mother who was full of warmth and joy is quite a lot, actually. More than most people get in a lifetime. And because, as I became a mother myself, I was nurtured, for a short time, by a team of wise and skilled people at Mount Sinai Hospital (an incubator that finished off the work that my mother left undone), I’ve been able to remember, clearly, what was best in her, and to discover what was, in fact, fully formed in me.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“Rick says, “Human beings are basically a disaster.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“It's so pervasive, this idea that genius can't come without trouble, that it has paved the way for countless abuses. As an adult, I find myself wholly intolerant of the fetishization of this archetype of genius, having seen, first-hand, great works made by decent, conscientious people...”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“When I first met him, Dr. Collins had said: “When you have a concussion, you don’t have good instincts about what will make you better. You want to lie in a dark room. You don’t want to be social. You want to drop out of your life. That bad instinct, coupled with bad advice, makes you much, much sicker than you need to be.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“When I first met concussion specialist Dr. Michael Collins, after three and a half years of suffering from post-concussive syndrome, he said, “If you remember only one thing from this meeting, remember this: run towards the danger.” In order for my brain to recover from a traumatic injury, I had to retrain it to strength by charging towards the very activities that triggered my symptoms. This was a paradigm shift for me—to greet and welcome the things I had previously avoided.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“Human beings are basically a disaster.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“Hearing emergency vehicles arrive for you is unexpectedly embarrassing. ("All this for me?")”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“The following weekend, Eric called my family and asked if we could come over to his apartment. When we got there, there was a brand-new synthesizer keyboard for me with a bow on it. And Robin Williams. I didn’t know until that moment that Robin Williams was to play the part of the King of the Moon. I was a huge fan of Mork & Mindy and I felt weak with happiness to get to be in his presence. I spent the day with Robin and Eric. Robin programmed himself doing different voices on all the effects keys, so I could play whole songs entirely in his voice. That day we walked around Rome, ate gelato, and went to the Vatican and St. Peter’s Square while Robin did impressions of the Pope and kept me laughing all day. From that day forward, both Eric and Robin seemed to have an agenda to make light moments for me. When it was possible, when the world around us wasn’t exploding and crumbling and freezing, they made up games for me, sang songs, and treated the set as a playground.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“I read every parenting book I could get my hands on. I lost myself in the extreme “attachment parenting” philosophy of Dr. Sears, who made me see mothers who put their babies down for five minutes or didn’t breastfeed their children until they were four as neglectful. It would be years before I realized that I was taking advice from an evangelical Christian who had eight children. There is no one more susceptible to overzealous parenting advice than a motherless mother.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“After twenty years in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, I’m used to noticing them, their smoke signals from the past drawing my attention to burned-out wreckage in a distant forest of the mind, packed and buried under years of debris, still smouldering.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“My confidante who worked as a Crown attorney paused before I left her office and said, “The advice you get from lawyers about what to do here isn’t necessarily going to be the same that you will give yourself as a woman, as a mother, as a political activist.” It was the first time someone had made this distinction for me, and it felt like an important one. Only one criminal lawyer I know, Chris Murphy, advised me, without reservation, to come forward. He said, “Say everything. Say everything about your sexual past, say everything about the ways in which you were interested in him, all of your inconsistencies, and then be clear that you know that what happened to you was an assault.” It was the right thing to do, he said. I said I was worried about the repercussions it could all have on my life. I said, “I’m the mother of two little kids.” He said, “Yes. You’re the mother of two little kids. That could be an argument for coming forward as well.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“My father, after my mother died, had fallen apart. It’s possible that he was always apart, and my mother had just, for many years and with great effort, held him together. Or perhaps he fell apart in a manner that many men of his generation would have after the woman who had done every practical thing in their lives for them for years died. His falling apart didn’t seem to cause him concern. Or perhaps it did and he just couldn’t fathom what to do about it. And so he did nothing. My siblings, who were all much older than I, had moved out of the house a long time before, leaving the house empty when I was at work or school. My dad sat in front of the TV all day, every day. At night he would play endless games of solitaire. I fell asleep, many nights, to the rhythmic flick, flick, flick of his cards on the coffee table, hearing them wind down into shorter numbers of flicks as he got closer to the ends of the lines of cards as he finished setting up the game.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“But the person who is really to blame is my mother, for dying. I’m hungry for my mother and it makes me angry and there is scar tissue ripping inside me making me scream and I might suddenly explode blood and I want a BATCH of something that is not diabetes-friendly that I can eat for days and days until there is no hunger anywhere inside me anymore so I can feel as though she didn’t die, leaving me to figure out how to be a mother after only eleven years of getting to witness my own.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“What, then, are we to do with the uncomfortable fact that people who have been traumatized do not often have a handle on the whole truth or are covering up some surrounding details of an assault out of shame or embarrassment? Are we trying to wedge the unruly reality of responses to sexual assault to fit into a rigid idea of truth in our criminal justice system? Is there any way to make room to accommodate the truth of the nature of this crime and the impact it has on people? What if lying is a sometimes unavoidable byproduct of what happens when someone experiences this kind of trauma? And what if much of what we are interpreting as lying is actually the blocking out of traumatic memory? Can our criminal justice system make room for this erratic but common human behaviour”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“I hate stories in which people can’t get to where they’re going.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“When I apologize for being overly sensitive, he puts out his arm to help me up to a sitting position and says, “I’d be far more sensitive. It’s an unpleasant experience. Please don’t ever apologize for having a reasonable response to something difficult. It’s hard enough to train doctors to behave like human beings.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“At some point in the interview I talk about why I think we tell stories. I say that I think it is necessary to create stories to make sense of our bewildering lives, to create a narrative around them, to have something to grasp onto in the chaos. When I watch myself give this answer now, years later, I imagine that my subconscious is working on something: it is working on the story of what happened with him that night, it is working to make sense of it, it is working to normalize the current moment, and it is also working to hide the true story from myself.”
― Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

“… noble is not what I’m thinking about. I don’t have a choice. If I pay to put him in there I wont hold onto the house and the house is the only thing we own outright. And it means a lot to me. This house does. Its… alright. I’ve done a lot on it. Fixing it up. Keeping it up. I don’t want to lose it. I’m not going to lose it… See the company left us high and dry. In the the end they said he ‘owed them money’. What do I think? Well, he was pretty stupid. But I’m not supposed to ask so I shut up. You’ve been married, right? You are married. You know what it’s like.”
― Sarah Polley, Away from Her: Screenplay