Dervla Kirwan Quotes

My family kept its history to itself. On the plus side, I didn't have to hear nightmarish stories about the Holocaust, the pogroms, terrible illnesses, painful deaths. My elderly parents never even spoke about their ailments.

I don't talk about the past.

Writing about carrying the past on your back is a manifestation of my Irishness, because we go on and on and will for another two or three generations.

I have a million questions about my granddad and no one to talk to.

I just don't like to talk about the past.

I'd love to meet my ancestors. I'd love to be able to speak to them.

I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.

Passed down from generation to generation, storytelling was an art in my family.

Anyone who doesn't miss the past never had a mother.

My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.

My earliest memories are the best. I always try to remember the good times when Daddy was alive.

I grew up in a society with a very ancient and strong oral storytelling tradition. I was told stories, as a child, by my grandmother, and my father as well.

I knew I could not cope with the future unless I was able to rediscover the past.

There are stories that people don't want to talk about that brought this music through.

I think it's important to have some documentation of the past.

My best attribute is knowing when not to answer stupid questions.

There is nothing on earth that could ever make me want to relive certain years of my life when I was young.

The bells cease, and the power goes from me, and I descend again to the world of the living; and if in some foolish confiding moment I try to explain why I want to re-live those old days, to tear the Truth out of the past so that all men shall see plainly, perhaps someone will say to me, 'Oh, the War! A tragedy - best forgotten.'

When my daughter asks, 'What do you do?', every movie I have a different answer. As she grows, she wants more explanations.

Remember the days of old, Think of the generations of long ago; Ask your father to recount it And your elders to tell the tale.

We all have those dreams of going back in time and seeing what it was like when our parents were younger.

Men say, 'I've loved you since I was 7 years old,' and I say, 'Well, you never contacted me.' And very often women say, 'Do youuuuuu know what I have?' and I want to say, 'Yessssssss, I do.' Because inevitably the answer is, 'An original Shirley Temple doll.'

Our present will become the past of other men and women. We depend on them to remember it with the complexity with which it was suffered. As others, once, depended on us.

My grandmother was not a great storyteller.

I think fundamentally, I had to make a decision really on whether this was a film about the past or the present. And 'The Act Of Killing' is a film about the present.