A Quote by David Strathairn

Film is our literature, so we should tell stories that are apropos of our culture, in that we can learn something about ourselves.

David Strathairn

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About Culture Film Learn Literature Our Ourselves Should Something Stories Tell

Quote Author

David Strathairn
American - Actor
Born: January 26, 1949

Stories--from the literature of our culture to descriptions of our days to the lunatic's ravings--appear to be hardwired into us. Even in sleep we tell ourselves stories through our dreams, and it's been shown that those who are prevented from doing so cease to function.

Michael Ruhlman

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Arundhati Roy

Symbols give us our identity, our self image, our way of explaining ourselves to ourselves and to others. Symbols in turn determine the kinds of stories we tell, and the stories we tell determine the kind of history we make and remake.

Mary Robinson

For me, as a documentary filmmaker, I'm interested in telling stories of real people whose experiences tell us something about ourselves or our history, or who we are and our potential.

Kristi Jacobson

We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our life stories and – equally important – to find ourselves by understanding our own life stories more clearly in the context of others.

Maureen Corrigan

CBC has a very important mandate to bind Canada together in both official languages, tell local stories, and make sure we have a sense of our strength, our culture, our stories.

Justin Trudeau

In this universe, and this existence, where we live with this duality of whether we exist or not and who are we, the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that define the potentialities of our existence. We are the stories we tell ourselves.

Shekhar Kapur

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves determine the quality of the selves we imagine we are. The stories we tell about others determine the quality of our relationships with them.

Rami M. Shapiro

You look at the Koran or the Bible, they all tell the same stories. You see them as the stories of the Middle East. The stories reflect who these people were in the Middle East, and this is where Western culture came from. All our literature is basically influenced by these great myths. So I'm fascinated by it. You could almost say I'm obsessed with it. But if you're asking about the effect of religion on my life - almost everything I do is opposed to the practice of religion.

Rabih Alameddine

So I decided to make a film about our need to tell stories, to own our stories, to understand them, and to have them heard.

Sarah Polley

As artists we have an extraordinary and rare privilege to tell the stories of our people, our land, our culture. They grip us, tear us apart, and put us back together. We are our stories.

Mena Massoud

When I went to West Point, I was there with cadets from 50 other states and territories. Cadets from other countries, and you learn all of these things about our country, about our culture, our heritage, our ethnicity. At the end of the day, you come back, we all wear green, and we all consider ourselves an Army.

Mark Esper

Most young people make films to be accepted, to be discovered, when in fact that was the last idea with the group I went to film school with. To be discovered was not our intention. Our intention was to tell our story our way, and make our own mistakes and learn from film to film.

Haile Gerima

The stories we tell about each other matter very much. The stories we tell ourselves about our own lives matter. And most of all, I think the way that we participate in each other's stories is of deep importance.

Jessica Jackley

As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves.