Ingmar Bergman Quotes

Faith is a torment, did you know that? It is like loving someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, no matter how loudly you call.

I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality.

I'm planning, you see, to try to confine myself to the truth. That's hard for an old, inveterate fantasy martyr and liar who has never hesitated to give truth the form he felt the occasion demanded.

Death: Do you never stop questioning?
Antonius Block: No. I never stop.

I want to stop. I want to stay on Fårö, and read the books I haven’t read, find out things I haven’t yet found out. I want to write things I haven’t written. To listen to music, and talk to my neighbors. To live together with my wife a very calm, very secure, very lazy existence, for the rest of my life.

I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot. And they have been forced to make themselves useful.

The time between midnight and dawn when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most palatable. It is the hour when the sleepless are pursued by their sharpest anxieties, when ghosts and demons hold sway. The hour of the wolf is also the hour when most children are born.

Everyone likes happiness, no one likes pain. But you can't have a rainbow without a little rain.

When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings. Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence.

I shall remember this moment: the silence, the twilight, the bowl of strawberries, the bowl of milk. Your faces in the evening light.[...] I shall carry this memory carefully in my hands as if it were a bowl brimful of fresh milk. It will be a sign to me, and a great sufficiency.

Reality is perhaps not at all what I imagine. Perhaps it doesn't exist, in fact. Perhaps it only exists as a longing.

Occasionally I sense an insane wail deep down in the pit, the echo alone reaching me, striking without warning, a child weeping uninhibitedly, imprisoned forever.

وبطبيعة الأمور أصبحت السينما وسيلتي للتعبير. صرت أعبر عن نفسي بلغة لا تمر بطريق الكلام الذي أفتقر له, بالموسيقى التي لست متمكنا منها وبالرسم الذي أشعر نحوه ببرودة. فجأة صار لدي إمكانية للاتصال مع العالم المحيط بلغة تنتقل من الروح إلى الروح وبصور بيانية تفلت, بشكل سبق تقريبا, من سيطرة العقل.

Here, in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity.

We make an idol of our fear and that idol we call God.