Chantal Akerman Quotes

I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it. That is why the children of survivors are so tragic. I see them in school. They don't know how

My mother was murdered by my step-father, my brother's father, who was also named Joel, twenty-five years ago. Whatever sadness or burden I've been living with since then, my brother's also been living with, but he's lived with the added burden of having the exact same name as our mother's murderer.

What really broke it down was I had my son while I was locked up, so that really affected me. I can't really have this, knowing my father was locked up when I was small. So that really out of everything - through the fame, the money, everything - that really put the toll on me: 'Oh yeah, I gotta change.'

In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

I think the typical way is that usually Holocaust survivors are known to be very quiet and full of anxiety, many of them don't like life, don't trust people. But my parents were children during the Holocaust. And my father was very optimistic.

The children of the nuclear age, I think, were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. Hard to love, when the loved one, and the lover, might at any instant become blood and flames, along with everybody else.

I always knew about as a kid, knew that that particular injury at [my grandfather's] finger had been caused in that disaster that killed his brother-in-law, my grandmother's brother. And he never talked about his own brother's death to me. My mother told me about that and told me about the impact on her family. And that's part of what you hear in the first verse of "Miner's Prayer."

As a child, I was very shy. Painfully, excruciatingly shy. I hid a lot in my room. I was so terrified to read out loud in school that I had to have my mother ask my reading teacher not to call on me in class.

I might sound crazy about this but, years ago, my mom told me: "We almost died when you were born. Both of us." I was a Caesarean baby, and the doctor who delivered me later told me, "I opened your mother up, and you were right there. It freaked me out because everything was broken and out-there." I've thought about it a lot - could this have something to do with the fact that I'm only happy when I'm at home and alone? Maybe I was just freaking out for two weeks before I was born, feeling really insecure.

When, as a child, I first opened my eyes on a Sunday-morning, a feeling of dismal anicipation, which began at least on the Friday,culminated. I knew what was before me, and my wish, if not my word, was "Would God it were evening!" It was no day of rest, but a day of texts, of catechisms (Watts'), of tracts about converted swearers, godly charwomen, and edifying deaths of sinners saved.... There was but one rosy spot, in the distance, all that day: and that was "bed-time," which never could come too early!

We're a nation of exhausted and over-stressed adults raising over-scheduled children.

Sons of suicides seldom do well.

This deep insecurity has been going on for a while. I mean I picked it up in 2014 sitting in focus groups of women who were feeling terrified, not just about that ISIS was coming, but terrified that their children couldn't be safe at school, terrified about what was happening in Ferguson and other places.

A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.

I can't do what my mother did, which is tell me every single day of my life about her labor and how long it was and how it was 36 hours of hell .

Just as the Depression left a generation of dads feeling they never had enough money, so father deprivation is leaving a generation of sons and daughters with different psychic wounds.

'Who was your mother?' 'Never had none!' said the child, with another grin. 'Never had any mother? What do you mean? Where were you born?' 'Never was born!' 'Do you know who made you?' 'Nobody, as I knows on,' said the child, with a short laugh. . . . 'I 'spect I grow'd.'

I heard more of the stories from my mother and my granny and my aunts that would describe what they had known that he didn't often talk about. I remember seeing [grandfather] as a child. He was working in a mine that was fairly close to their home there in Betsy Lane, Ky., and it was so close in proximity that he wouldn't clean up or shower there. He would just drive back home. And I remember one time seeing him come in and it was like seeing an alien person show up because he was still covered in coal dust and soot, and it had a profound impact on me.

Children, together with women, constitute 90 percent of all refugee populations on the planet as well as the vast majority of those living in absolute poverty: the 'feminization of poverty' means that children are poor, too, since most parenting is done by mothers.

What happens with fear is that probability doesn't matter very much. That is, once I have raised the possibility that something terrible can happen to your child, even though the possibility is remote, you may find it very difficult to think of anything else. Emotion becomes dominant.

What I remember the most about my childhood is constant fear and "good food." I don't want to get into the greasy, buttery, deep-fried, fatty, sugary, meaty, barbecued details here, but with no knowledge of healthy lifestyles or positive psychology, time took its toll on me.

Our children are the only people on whom we can safely take revenge for what was done to us.

I think one of the great primordial fears we have once we become conscious of our aloneness as children is the fear of losing our mother. We have that from the moment we realize we can lose her just in the supermarket. As a child, it was more terrifying than arithmetic.

I remember as a child of eight being told by a young friend that I had killed Christ. That was news to me. It's a common experience for the Jewish young. Should later generations of Germans be burdened with the guilt arising from the profound inhumanity of their ancestors? Revenge may be sweet, but guilt is non-transferable. Still, hatreds survive with the persistence of cockroaches.

I hope it never becomes normal to feel scrutinized.