Frances McDormand Quotes

I am often drawn to what appear at first to be 'dark' or 'difficult' subjects, but which, upon further examination, are always and only reflections of the ways human beings attempt, however clumsily, badly, or well, to connect with others.

What's powerful about a love scene is not seeing the act. It's seeing the passion, the need, the desire, the caring, the fear.

Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.

Beyond the beauty, the sex, the titillation, the surface, there is a human being. And that has to emerge.

People break down after a couple of hours. All the defenses go down, and there's a kind of communication that if I spent 20 years in a living room with one of these people, I would never, never know as much about them as I do in that one day.

Even The Impostors, as silly as it is, is a very intimate film, in a way.

You can only love and be loved to the extent that you know and are known by somebody.

'The Larry Sanders Show,' it's actually about love, which would sound like a paradox at first. But if that love didn't exist, the darker attitudes would not play. You would have a one-dimensional, cynical show, which I don't think the show was.

It's fun to get really intense and emotionally detailed and complicated.

Love is a lot more complicated than people think.

Real human emotion is always interesting.

Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.

I want to do things or write things that make people feel a bit more beautiful or tragic or something because there are so many other things than just funny.

Yes, I've got inwardness and tenderness, but I also get angry and vituperative, and you have to honour that as well.

We don't fall in love with perfect people. We fall in love with complex ones.

People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.

She thought of how precious it was to be able to know another person over many years. There was incomparable richness in it.

And maybe it is only by finding yourself that you can feel the true intensity of becoming close to another person.

It’s never simple.” Avery slid an arm around Hope’s waist. “It shouldn’t be. Because being with someone should matter enough to be at least a little bit complicated.

Love is selflessness and self-fullness; it can only be known deeply with an open, vulnerable heart.

That day I think we really saw each other for the first time. I mean, saw beyond the bag of bones on the outside. You take away her pretty and my plain and what you get underneath is about the same: a couple of lost girls looking to be found.

For the first time, I saw what was in his heart, and I wondered if he might ever want to look deep enough to see mine.

Everything in his life had come down to the sensation of her fingers against his. The person he was, the history he carried within himself, every joy and grief he had ever experienced, slipped way like an irrelevant garment. He was nothing but skin, speaking to another skin, and between the skins there was no need to find any words.

The messiness [in my books] is nothing like an Atwood novel. For me, the deeper subjects are secrets versus intimacy, and how both beget safety but also threaten it. And there is a lot for me about loss, too.

I didn't understand that when you make love, you actually do MAKE love. Stir things. Affect each other. The breath that escapes from me is dazzled. He breathes it in with a gasp.