"There’s a legend in my family about my great-grandmother, who lived through the Cuban War of Independence and the Spanish-American War. The Spanish came to take over her farm when she was 16 years old and sent her family to internment camps. The legend is that my great-grandmother refused to go; she took her pet pig under her arms and walked up into the mountain to join the rebels. That’s as much of the story as I could ever get from anyone. I always had an image of this young woman finding a way to survive a terrible war. The play that I eventually wrote is not her story, but it’s certainly infused with her spirit…"

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“We’re not allowed in an open way, in a public way, to talk about our grief and our experiences, our challenges, or our failures, which is what I tried to do.”

“I wanted to really be sure that the play never became a play about how to grieve…And in order to accomplish that I needed the play to remain in this time of confusion and chaos.”

“I remember feeling that if I don’t express this somehow, I’ll despair, I’ll go mad. Looking back, part of it was about trying to impose some kind of order in a process that was decidedly chaotic. Because of my profession, I tend to understand the world in words, in sequences of events. What I saw later was that I was trying to document as clearly as possible an emotional journey. And it felt important at the time that I remember it in its entirety and its complexity.”

Resonant Thoughts

"I was shamed into helping the unborn after 12 years of silence, in 1986. Since then, my only client has been the unborn. I don't work for a movement. I don't work for a party. I don't work for candida…"

— Paul deParrie

Religion1949–2006

#justice

"I don't make biographical films … None of the films is about me. Not a single one. None. I have my life and I'll simply never tell anyone what part of me is in my films. I won't ever tell anyone about…"

— Krzysztof Kieślowski

Entertainment1941–1996

#life

"But it was not only the Brahmans, who were thus put in a state of terror of forcible conversion, for, in this same month, a Raja of the Kshatriya family of Parappanad, also "Tichera Terupar , a princi…"

— William Logan (author)

Law1841–1914

#family

"verything else are ideas about the world, and I suspect that they are relatively sparse, and also the intuitive models that we form about social interaction. ...he priors are present in most social an…"

— Joscha Bach

Philosophy1973

#family