Elia Kazan

https://flic.kr/p/3nS7VP

'Persons of genius with mysterious gifts: in many cases a wound has been inflicted early in life, which impels the person to strive harder or makes him or her extra-sensitive. The talent, the genius, is the scab on the wound, there to protect a weak place, an opening to death. Men and women who come successfully out of misfortune, they have strength that is extraordinary.'

Elia Kazan: A Life, 1989

Elia Kazan directed 'Splendor in the Grass', 1961
which featured the lines from Wordsworth:

'Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower
We will grieve not, but rather find
Strength in what remains behind.'

My Story - Marilyn Monroe

Photo by Tim Rickwood

'But things weren’t entirely black – not yet. They really never are. When you’re young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Wednesday you’re laughing again.

After lying around for a few days feeling sorry for myself and feeling what a failure I was, something would come back into my heart again. I wouldn’t say things out loud, but I could hear them as if voices were talking to me, get up, you haven’t begun yet, you’re different, something wonderful is going to happen.

And wonderful things did happen on the ocean bottom – in a small way.

I met kind people.'

My Story

Marilyn Monroe with Ben Hecht

Taylor Trade 2007 Joshua Greene

deep-dived the words

'All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.'

Jeanette Winterson 2011
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jonathan Cape, London
p. 9
http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/