quotes from movie

 from movie:  Stories We Tell

When you're in the middle of a story, it isn't a story at all but rather a confusion, a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood, like a house in a whirlwind or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard are powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all, when you're telling it to yourself or someone else.

Margaret Atwood
(Alias Grace)
------

(Narrator to his daughter)

And in some ways,that's why
This whole questions of ...

"Was I your father, or, wasn't I?"

 It becomes very sort of an unimportant part of the past,
for me, anyway,
I think it's much more important for you.
For me, it's just one of those things happened along with life.

So, don't feel sorry for me, If you have pity, it should be for Harry,
who loved and lost Diane and then missed out on the childhood of Sarah that he produced.

Had that been my lot, I would have been mortified when I read that DNA result.
I've been a very lucky man, and, of course, for one of my luckiest moments,
I have to thank Harry Gulkin for loving Diane.

Sarah's only what she is because of that night of love between Diane and Harry. 
Had I been her biological father, she would have been entirely different.
 She might have been better or worse, but she would definitely not have been the Sarah she is today.
And that's the one I love.Of the other possible outcome, there's nothing.

You may decide you want to keep this letter to yourself, or to share it.
It's yours, and yours the choice.

You know, look...while telling me your news on Thursday, you twice hugged me as hard as you ever did in your childhood.
That alone made you revelation worth a thousand words.

So, there you have it.
All I know of what happened or what has been reported to me has been told.
I think I wrote this story because it really says so many interesting things about the human condition.

But maybe there was another reason.
Perhaps, deep inside,
I have suffered more of a shock than I would  have openly admit.
I sometimes stop and realize that something inside, has for the rest of my life changed.
A certain cord that runs between Sarah and me has been severed, and I am powerless to join it together.  It's not a real thing.  It only exists because we have developed this facet called imagination, and that is all too real and tangible.  It gives pain.  It's brief, and soon I am back again at the keyboard, reliving the past 40 years.  But I suppose it will always be lurking to catch me unawares.  So perhaps this story is a form of denial.

How ironic it is that the final revelation and its aftermath have brought Sarah and I closer together and resulted in me writing volumes, as Diane always wanted me to.  It has given me a new lease on life.

/
/
/
I will go on
I will go on.
----------------

The movie used one line from a poem.  I found the poem online.  Here it is, the red letters are the verse they used in the movie.


Tonight I can write the saddest lines

bu Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example,'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her voide. Her bright body. Her inifinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.