I also think we have to believe in a happy ending. We have to, otherwise what is anybody doing? I always have this frustration that, in a therapeutic sense, it can feel you have one of two ways of relating to your parents: one is you’re in denial, and the other is you can be really angry at them. And I’m, like, there has to be a way in which you just love them. And I feel that there has to be a story that’s true to its marrow and also filled with joy. There has to be that. Otherwise, it’s utterly depressing.

This is lofty, but in one of Hamlet’s soliloquies he says, ‘This brave o’erhanging firmament,’ and he’s talking about the air and the stars and how everything is so alive and so beautiful, and at the end of it he says, ‘It means nothing, it means nothing, and I don’t want to live.’ And I’m, like, ‘How can you see everything and then feel that way?’ I always want to find the reverse of that—–to see all the darkness and find the light, as opposed to see all the light and resonate with the nothingness.’…Everything doesn’t have to be true to have power.

-Greta Gerwig, The New Yorker

“How can you see everything and then feel that way?” This is a question I want to pose to everybody, and to some of my lovers—how could you feel that way and then walk away?

Image from Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Anderson, 2003. Crossposted with Love Dog.