Quotes from Maya Deren

Use your freedom to experiment with visual ideas.

The way back is always shorter.

Myth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter.

If someone from politics got up to give a lecture on New Guinea without having read the literature in the field or been there, the anthropologists would be horrified out of their wits, and properly so. Yet these people get up and lecture on social systems without having read Trotsky or Lenin or Hook. A hell of an attitude for people who make a fetish of scholar!

The labor to achieve inspired, intelligent form is a single continuity, a work in progress which is eventually interrupted when the dynamic consciousness which it reflects ceases. From time to time one may pause to give integrated shape to a stage of one's progress, in order to best pursue it further. And so these films have each been brought to an end, in order to be better abandoned.

And what more could I possibly ask as an artist than that your most precious visions, however rare, assume sometimes the forms of my images.