Phillip Noyce Quotes

One of the things that I share with Bryan Becket is this hole in my childhood memory. There's about five years of my life that's virtually gone. I've thought about it a lot, and I've come to the conclusion that it might be for my own protection that those memories are gone, and maybe I don't want to dredge up those things.

I've been hiding crucial events in my life since I was 13.

If I were to sum up the negative reactions to my work, I think there are two primary causes: one is that if there is discourse about anxiety it is necessarily going to induce anxiety. It will represent a return of the repressed for a great many people.

It's hard to sleep at night because I'm still wondering where my mother is.

I think a lot of us can relate to not choosing to face a painful memory, and something that's a painful past, and wanting to pretend like it never happened.

What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.

When it was over, it was not really over, and that was the trouble.

I've got tooth marks on my heart.

I think when people are repressing things, or burying things, that can manifest in all sorts of ways.

I sang with my father for over 50 years, and now all of a sudden he's gone, and I just dropped out.

I think it's difficult to forget things that are unresolved.

I think family skeletons are best left where they are-- in the closet

Your experiences are what made you what you are today. So when tragedy happens in people's lives, and things are left unsaid, it can be very unsettling. The lack of closure can linger.

Raising children is like a hit and run. You've been hit, you can't flag the person down, you're wounded and you don't know who to blame, and no one helps you. And it's weeks, maybe months, before you find out what really happened.

I don't think I can go back to New Orleans. I don't think that's possible.

It's not good for you to be barred from traveling to certain places in your head because some skeleton is in the closet.

I used to bottle things up.

What you try to bury just ends up burying you.

The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.

Answerless questions can destroy you. Move on.

They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.

The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities and businesses and economic relations, shook them also out of their old-established habits of thought, and out of the lightly held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.

i am a limitless series of natural disasters and all of these disasters have been unnaturally repressed.

It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes.