I don't watch my own films very often. I become so jittery and ready to cry... and miserable. I think it's awful.
I want to confess as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face and feel loathing and horror. My indifference to men has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote explores deep feelings of emptiness and disconnection from reality and others.
Ingmar Bergman's quote expresses a profound sense of alienation and emotional void experienced by the speaker. They reflect on their inner turmoil and apathy towards others, suggesting that their heart is empty, leading to feelings of horror and loathing when confronted with their own image. This profound emptiness transforms their reality into a dreamlike state, making them feel like a prisoner within their own mind, surrounded by memories and ghosts of connections that once were.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a discussion about existential philosophy during a university lecture.
More from Ingmar Bergman
All quotes →To shoot a film is to organize an entire universe.
I'd prostitute my talents if it would further my cause, steal if there was no way out, killing my friends or anyone else if it would help my art.
To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure. It's not only the artist I'm sorry for. It's just that I know exactly where he feels most humiliated.
Only someone who is well prepared has the opportunity to improvise.
When you feel perpetually unmotivated, you start questioning your existence in an unhealthy way; everything becomes a pseudo intellectual question you have no interest in responding whatsoever. This whole process becomes your very skin and it does not merely affect you; it actually defines you. So, you see yourself as a shadowy figure unworthy of developing interest, unworthy of wondering about the world - profoundly unworthy in every sense and deeply absent in your very presence.
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There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.
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