Lori Davidson

“We are always concocting theories about how the world works and why people act in the ways they do. We invent motives for them, as if it's possible for us to know, but more often than not these explanations are like flimsy cardboard state sets we put up in front of reality because they are simpler and less distracting than what's actually there. I think I became a documentary filmmaker to try to get a truer view. It's not that film can't lie or distort or be used for dastardly purposes, it's that sometimes the camera extracts from the faces and bodies of its subjects what they do not say aloud. I was sixteen when I first saw Marcel Ophuls's The Sorrow and the Pity, and after that, I couldn't stop thinking about he expressiveness of people's hands when they are controlling their faces.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World

“...a broken body is a price worth paying for a strong and undefiled spirit. We live in a world of lies, whether we want it or not. That's just the case. But you shouldn't accommodate to it," she tells me as I sit her table in suburban Budapest. "You will be surrounded by lies--you don't have a choice. Don't assimilate to it. It's an individual decision for each person. If you want to live in fear, or if you want to live in the freedom of the soul. If your soul is free, then your thoughts are free, and then your words are going to be free.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“Perhaps I wished for something rather than nothing--a smack of passion to make me believe I was really there for him, not missing. And then the blow rises up from imaginary depths. When there is nothing, the phantoms come up to fill the emptiness. It is not true that nothing comes of nothing. There is always something.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World

“I watched the gulls and looked over at Lady Liberty. I thought about what Harry must be feeling because she wouldn't see her again, not like this, anyway. I wanted her to know it would be better, more beautiful on the other side, but it was sad because we can't help loving what's around us even if it is grasping and attachment to the things that don't really matter when you take a higher spiritual perspective.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World