Intergenerational Memory Quotes

Stories of the Crusades are still told in Moslem cafes and families as if they occurred yesterday.

I could direct a very decent Holocaust film, but I don't have the same experience as a young boy who was rocked to sleep in the lap of a grandmother who had a tattooed number on her arm, who told him stories of the people who disappeared, the relatives she never saw again, as he drifted off with his cheek nestled next to that number.

I grew up in a very cultural household, but part of our culture is that we don't really take photos.

I'm glad that Jewish kids are taught about the Holocaust and other stories in our history, but I wonder if there are ways that this information and narrative can be transmitted differently.

Well, yes. I believe that children's souls are the inheritors of historical memory from previous generations. It's just that as they grow older and experience the everyday world that memory sinks lower and lower. I feel I need to make a film that reaches down to that level. If I could do that I would die happy.

Although my grandmother lived out her long life in the shadow of Rainy Mountian, the immense landscape of the continental interior lay like memory in her blood

The idea is that there is a kind of memory in nature. Each kind of thing has a collective memory. So, take a squirrel living in New York now. That squirrel is being influenced by all past squirrels.

The old will die and the young will forget.

We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.