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"I have made all my films for my children with the exception of my first film because my oldest daughter wasn't born when I was making the film about the Brooklyn Bridge."
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"What thumbsuckers we all are...when it comes to mothers."
"Of course there are mothers,squeezing their breastsdry, pawning their bodies,shedding teeth for their children,or that's our fond belief.But remember - Hanseland Gretel were dumped in the forestbecause their parents were starving."
"Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us."
"To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense."
"As a mother, you need to remember that a loving and compassionate God is one hundred percent aware of your child's situation."
"He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father."
"My father's attitude was that this was but an inevitable phase of my growing up and he affected to take it lightly. But beneath his jocular, boys-together air, he was at a loss, he was frightened. Perhaps he had supposed that my growing up would bring us closer together- whereas, now that he was trying to find out something about me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me. And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitably undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying."
"But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after - oh, that's love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she's gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She's the one you can't put down."
Explore more quotes by Ken Burns
"One of the things I really like about Ford's films is how there is always a focus on the way characters live, and not just the male heroes."
"You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living."
"I think my expectations for myself are much more severe and much more direct. You can't work on a film for six years without being your own toughest critic. So you can't really be distracted by the expectations based on your previous performance."
"You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time."
"I am passionately interested in understanding how my country works. And if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America you have to know about the Civil War."
"I enjoy total creative control right now. Nobody tells me to make it longer, shorter, better, sexier, more violent, whatever."
"I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style."
"The stories from 1975 on are not finished and there is no resolve. I could spend 50 hours on the last 25 years of jazz and still not do it justice."
"I think we too often make choices based on the safety of cynicism, and what we're lead to is a life not fully lived. Cynicism is fear, and it's worse than fear - it's active disengagement."
"I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities."
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