A Quote by Stanley Kauffmann

What is a memory? Not a storehouse, not a trunk in the attic, but an instrument that constantly refines the past into a narrative, accessible and acceptable to oneself.

Stanley Kauffmann

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Acceptable Accessible Attic Constantly Instrument Memory Narrative Oneself Past Trunk

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Stanley Kauffmann
American - Author
April 24, 1916 - October 9, 2013

There are plenty of writers, past and present, from Shakespeare to Henry James to Lydia Davis, who test the limits of coherence and put pressure on current notions of accessible (and acceptable) narrative methods. To thrive and change and grow, any art needs this kind of pressure.

Joanna Scott

To the scientist Nature is a storehouse of facts, laws, processes; to the artist she is a storehouse of pictures; to the poet she is a storehouse of images, fancies, a source of inspiration; to the moralist she is a storehouse of precepts and parables; to all she may be a source of knowledge and joy.

John Burroughs

There was a hidden narrative I felt we could get into, It's about an accessible world. Family and relationships are accessible subjects.

John Madden

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

Walter Benjamin

Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried.

Walter Benjamin

I wasn't just the madwoman in the attic--I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Work builds and refines character, creates beauty, and is the instrument of our service to one another and to God.

D. Todd Christofferson

There is no such thing as an acceptable level of unemployment, because hunger is not acceptable, poverty is not acceptable, poor health is not acceptable, and a ruined life is not acceptable.

Hubert H. Humphrey

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.

Thomas Merton

I don't think people want to look at problems. They want a continuous narrative, an optimistic narrative. A narrative that says there's a present and a future - and what was in the past no longer exists.

Claudia Rankine

Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.

Lewis B. Smedes

I have an aluminium trunk that I came to Delhi with. God has given me a lot in the last 27 years, but that trunk remains with me. I can return to Motihari with that trunk but I have my family to support.

Ravish Kumar

We cherish the conventional story of Dr. King and nonviolence, in fact, precisely because that narrative demands so little of us…This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened.

Timothy B. Tyson

Historians constantly rewrite history, reinterpreting (reorganizing) the records of the past. So, too, when the brain's coherent responses become part of a memory, they are organized anew as part of the structure of consciousness. What makes them memories is that they become part of that structure and thus form part of the sense of self; my sense of self derives from a certainty that my experiences refer back to me, the individual who is having them. Hence the sense of the past, of history, of memory, is in part the creation of the self.

Israel Rosenfield

Nothing in my life ever seemed to fade away or take its rightful place among the pantheon of experiences that constituted my eighteen years. It was all still with me, the storage space in my brain crammed with vivid memories, packed and piled like photographs and old dresses in my grandmother’s bureau. I wasn’t just the madwoman in the attic — I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

I guess the wildcard here is Terrence Malick. He supervised me while I was writing the script for Beautiful Country, and he is a genius, although not always easy to follow. What I learned from him is that the narrative can be tracked through all kinds of scenes, that the strong narrative thread is not always the one that is most obvious. Creating narrative with Malick was a bit like chasing a butterfly through a jungle. This approach to narrative is fun and complicated, something that makes the process of writing constantly interesting to this writer.

Sabina Murray

A Quote by Stanley Kauffmann

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