SAM SHEPARD
Fool for Love

I missed you. I did. I missed you more than anything I ever missed in my whole life. I kept thinkin’ about you the whole time I was driving. Kept seeing you. Sometimes just a part of you.

SAM SHEPARD

There's some hidden, deeply rooted thing in the Anglo male American that has to do with inferiority, that has to do with not being a man, and always, continually having to act out some idea of manhood that is invariably violent. This sense of failure runs very deep. Maybe it has to do with the frontier being systematically taken away, with the guilt of having gotten this country by wiping out a native race of people, with the whole Protestant work ethic. I can't put my finger on it, but it's the source of a lot of intrigue for me.

SAM SHEPARD

I don’t know what the American Dream is. I do know it doesn’t work. Not only doesn’t it work, the myth of the American Dream has created extraordinary havoc, and it’s going to be our demise

This notion that not only were we given this land by God somehow, but that we’re entitled to do whatever we wanted with it, regardless of the consequences, and reap all the fortunes out of the land, much to the detriment of everyone else

This rampant puritanical class of European colonialism behind the whole thing is land hungry Europeans wanting to dominate. The move westward was promoted by advertising with words like “Free Land,” “Manifest Destiny." 

We always prefer the fantasy over the reality.

Currently Watching

CRIMES OF THE HEART
Bruce Beresford
USA, 1986

SAM SHEPARD

Forensic & The Navigators

____________________

Doberman pinschers, German shepherds, wire-haired pointing griffons circling the place, sniffing for trouble, ready to tear out a throat on those that smell of a different turf. Do you understand? No young blond dopey muscle boys practicing jujitsu on the front lawn. We’re vulnerable as all get-out. We’ve left ourselves with our drawers down. That gives you all the room to plunge in and you have. Which means for us that we temporarily have to abandon the idea of temporarily abandoning the project and throw ourselves once again into the meat of the game. You’ve forced our hand, as it were.

SAM SHEPARD

I don’t know what the American Dream is. I do know it doesn’t work. Not only doesn’t it work, the myth of the American Dream has created extraordinary havoc, and it’s going to be our demise

This notion that not only were we given this land by God somehow, but that we’re entitled to do whatever we wanted with it, regardless of the consequences, and reap all the fortunes out of the land, much to the detriment of everyone else

This rampant puritanical class of European colonialism behind the whole thing is land hungry Europeans wanting to dominate. The move westward was promoted by advertising with words like “Free Land,” “Manifest Destiny." 

We always prefer the fantasy over the reality.

SAM SHEPARD
Action

Could you create some reason for me to move? Some justification for me to find myself somewhere else?

SAM SHEPARD from Curse of the Starving Class

Do you know what this is? It’s a curse. I can feel it. It’s invisible but it’s there. It’s always there. It comes onto us like nighttime. Every day I can feel it. Every day I can see it coming. And it always comes. Repeats itself. It comes even when you do everything to stop it from coming. Even when you try to change it. And it goes back. Deep. It goes back and back to tiny little cells and genes. To atoms. To tiny little swimming things making up their minds without us. Plotting in the womb. Before that even. In the air. We’re surrounded with it. It’s bigger than government even. It goes forward too. We spread it. We pass it on. We inherit it and pass it down, and then pass it down again. It goes on and on like that without us.

SAM SHEPARD from Fool for Love

I missed you. I did. I missed you more than anything I ever missed in my whole life. I kept thinkin’ about you the whole time I was driving. Kept seeing you. Sometimes just a part of you.

SAM SHEPARD from Buried Child

Well you can hardly blame others for not fulfilling your hallucination.

SAM SHEPARD from “Dust”

He thought if he wandered long enough, he’d get good and lost. He’d get so hopelessly lost that he’d be forced into some part of himself that he’d never known before. Some part he’d be forced to meet up with. The proposition thrilled and terrified him. It was the mind that wouldn’t cooperate. He couldn’t control the picturings. There was no rhyme or reason to their appearance. He watched them pop up in his head as though he were sitting in a Wednesday matinee from long ago, with no one else in the theater.

He saw John Wayne wearing a buffalo coat. President Bush in a baseball cap, with a tie on. Bombs falling on Baghdad. Bombs seen from high above as though he were looking straight down through the hatch. The fat, self-satisfied face of General Schwarzkopf. A boy swinging a sledgehammer at the Berlin Wall and not making a dent. Pictures of news. Pictures of faces making news. Pictures of crows and hawks. A dead rabbit’s head.

Then Madilia. Her eyes. Her violent, magnificent eyes.

SAM SHEPARD from Seduced

What difference does it make? It’s a good story. One story’s as good as another. It’s all in the way you tell it. That’s what counts. That’s what makes the difference.

SAM SHEPARD from Action

I’m getting better now. Even in the middle of all this violence.