Quotes About Excavate

Memory is a wound, you said. And some things are released only by the act of writing. Unless I go in with my scalpel and suction to excavate, to clean, to bring into light, that wound festers, and the gangrene of decay will eat me alive.

You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.

We begin to excavate our buried dreams. This is a tricky process ... the mere act of brushing some of them off sends an enormous surge of energy bolting through our denial system ... we make what Robert Bly calls a decent into ashes. We mourn the self we abandoned ... we find a certain amount of grief to be essential ... We must allow the bolt of pain to strike us. Remember, this is useful pain; lightning illuminates.

I excavate history. I look at lives buried under too much silence. Periods of time, like slavery, have to be revisited, reimagined, so we can move through them.

the appearance of a shovel.

a glorified spade.

We are the only ones who really can care about the preservation Foreigners who come to excavate, maybe some of them care about preservation, but the majority care about discoveries.

The tasks of paleontologists and classical historians and archaeologists are remarkably similar - to excavate, decipher and bring to life the tantalizing remnants of a time we will never see.

The U.S. War Department had even pondered tunneling beneath the seabed: a detailed study deemed the project "feasible," requiring one year and 15,000 men to excavate 55,000 tons of spoil. Wiser heads questioned "the strategic and functional" complexities, such as the inconvenience of the entire German Seventh Army waiting for the first tunneler to emerge. The study was shelved.

He wasn't sure what disturbed him more—that the Others were able to excavate that much dirt from either side of the road and pile it into a hill that quickly . . . or the smiley face made out of boulders that was pressed into this side of the mound.

It was love. He excavated a boot print she'd left on the snowy step outside his apartment and preserved it in his freezer.

Sand dunes are almost like ready-made buildings in a way. All we need to do is solidify the parts that we need to be solid, and then excavate the sand, and we have our architecture. We can either excavate it by hand, or we can have the wind excavate it for us.

There is treasure hidden beneath the entire land, but the problem is people are unwilling to dig it out.

To excavate a pyramid is the dream of every archaeologist.

Likewise, every disturbance, whether resolved or not, is making space for an inner engagement. As a shovel digs up and displaces earth, in a way that must seem violent to the earth, an interior space is revealed for the digging. In just this way, when experience opens us, it often feels violent and the urge, quite naturally, is to refill that opening, to make it the way it was. But every experience excavates a depth, which reveals its wisdom once opened to air.

We've turned film into such an industry that we pursue naturalism just by shaking the camera and cutting the film to ribbons to provoke a bogus sense of documentary. But we haven't done the homework. To push the depth that the Actor's Studio did or the Russian theatres did with their actors is to rehearse, to spend time, to dig, to excavate.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

The best adaptations are the ones that really excavate the material. The movies that work are the ones in which somebody very smart figured out how to take all the thematic material, all the character material, all the filigree, all the beautiful writing and put it into a story.

The deepest sorrow, he thought. Where the only way to survive is to excavate everything.

It was full of the usual strata of desk-drawer shit, and I could have excavated for five minutes without finding anything more useful than pencil shavings and paper clips.

What helps writers, and ultimately, obviously, helps the actors - who should serve the words that the writer puts on the page - is if the character has damages, because then the writers can cultivate and excavate, like a dentist going into a tooth.

I can think of no other writer who so thoroughly embodies the Jamesian spirit as Alison Lurie. Like him she can excavate all the possibilities of a theme. Like his, her books seem long, unbroken threads, seamless progressions of effects.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

personal well-being serves solely to excavate within your soul a chasm which waits to be filled by a landslide of dread, an empty mold whose peculiar dimensions will one day manufacture the shape of your unique terror