Top 40 Sarah Polley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’m never sure what’s coming next, but I’m an open minded person and I welcome any challenge.”

— Sarah Polley

2. “I want my world to get bigger and not end up in a small corner.”

— Sarah Polley

3. “It’s hard to give up that amount of control. It’s scary to make yourself that vulnerable. Because you might do all kinds of things that are unplanned or are unexpected that maybe don’t work, and you have to trust the director to see that and work around those things. I find it really scary.”

— Sarah Polley

4. “My mom died of cancer when I was really young. I’m not someone who tries to work out their own stuff with a role, but I think that happened despite my best efforts to keep myself separate from it.”

— Sarah Polley

5. “It’s not that I don’t want to become famous or that I’m obsessed by my work as an actress, but it’s all about not limiting myself, such as putting myself in a little jail that I can escape from.”

— Sarah Polley

6. “It’s amazing how the world does actually go on in the middle of things that should stop it for us.”

— Sarah Polley

7. “With being a mother, I feel like you choose how you spend your time so much more carefully – which is a good thing.”

— Sarah Polley

8. “AIDS is a global problem and there should be a global solution found by the entire international community. It is really scary to see and imagine our world fall into pieces because we refuse to share and put in the common vestiges of our civilizations.”

— Sarah Polley

9. “Lately I did a film called All I Want for Christmas and it was well received. This gave me a new point of view and a new respect for my work as an actress.”

— Sarah Polley

10. “In fact, there’s an entire universe out there that’s pretty much indifferent to struggles that big, no matter how serious they’ve been in your life.”

— Sarah Polley

11. “Some of the funniest moments I’ve ever experienced have been in the midst of tragic situations in my life.”

— Sarah Polley

12. “So I decided to make a film about our need to tell stories, to own our stories, to understand them, and to have them heard.”

— Sarah Polley

13. “I’m a control freak and I like to be overprepared, and I’m overly organized and I’m not in the moment a lot of the time.”

— Sarah Polley

14. “I think that cynicism can often be mistaken for wisdom.”

— Sarah Polley

15. “I still feel that a movie has to attempt to say something – even if it fails miserably. But I’ve sort of given up on believing that I’m going to change the world with every film I choose to act in.”

— Sarah Polley

16. “Acting is something that I’ve done since I was so young. I always felt – certainly as a teenager – really cynical about acting. I definitely didn’t feel like it was something I wanted to do, and so I really took it for granted.”

— Sarah Polley

17. “Well, because Dawn of the Dead can take place anywhere and it shows that actually the entire planet is contaminated, I would say that it shows the new face of our world – one person, one race, united against the invisible destructive force.”

— Sarah Polley

18. “I think that we need to get along together if we want to survive in the twenty-first century.”

— Sarah Polley

19. “The past and present, I have come to realize, are in constant dialogue, acting upon one another in a kind of reciprocal pressure dance.”

— Sarah Polley

20. “There is no point trying to figure out who is guilty or not at un-balancing the planet. I think we need to figure out and solve the problems together and not isolate from each other.”

— Sarah Polley

21. “Being a human being is all about experiencing all of the wonders of the world and therefore as an actress, I’m open to any opportunity that may enrich my horizon.”

— Sarah Polley

22. “I think that the idea of family is a very powerful and influential and disjointed thing that will always captivate me.”

— Sarah Polley

23. “I always look for an intense experience, an intense ride. There is nothing better than a good zombie movie where you run crazy and blow at monsters! It was a physical shoot and I enjoyed it.”

— Sarah Polley

24. “Plus, doing a zombie movie is quite liberating. It’s fun not to take myself seriously all the time.”

— Sarah Polley

25. “I enjoy doing my more intimate and less commercial pictures and also I enjoy directing.”

— Sarah Polley

26. “It’s been really important to me to create moments where there’s a breath or moments where there’s a laugh or moments where there’s real life that’s allowed to seep in through the cracks of whatever melodrama is happening, because that’s what does happen in life.”

— Sarah Polley

27. “I was concerned about that, because I’ve always been so specific about doing independent films, but I’ve never done anything that’s so genuinely and ridiculously fun. And that’s a great thing, for me to discover that that’s possible.”

— Sarah Polley

28. “I do tend to take time off. A year and a half ago I went to film school, and before that I had taken years off at a time to be involved politically or this or that.”

— Sarah Polley

29. “Playing roles that are intense and damaged has always come more easily to me than doing comedies or lighter stuff – that would be taking a huge risk for me.”

— Sarah Polley

30. “The past was affecting how I moved through the world, while present life was affecting how the past moved through me.”

— Sarah Polley

31. “I know now that I will become weaker at what I avoid, that what I run towards will strengthen in me. I know to listen to my body, but not so much that I convince myself I can’t do things or that I can’t push myself.”

— Sarah Polley

32. “You seem restless, in a kind of permanent way.”

— Sarah Polley

33. “I can already sense how I will feel when I remember it years from now. I’m nostalgic for the present, mourning its passing even as it happens.”

— Sarah Polley

34. “It can seem perplexing from the outside, this pull that many women experience to make things better for those who have hurt us. The impulse to smooth things over the keep ourselves safe...”

— Sarah Polley

35. “There are certain people from whom you can immediately intuit that their fiercest expression of warmth is brutalizing honesty.”

— Sarah Polley

36. “It’s so pervasive, this idea that genius can’t come without trouble, that it has paved the way for countless abuses. As an adult, I find myself wholly intolerant of the fetishization of this archetype of genius, having seen, first-hand, great works made by decent, conscientious people...”

— Sarah Polley

37. “When she left, she left me searching the planet for anyone remotely like her.”

— Sarah Polley

38. “So much of coming to terms with hard things from the past seems to be about believing our own accounts, having our memories confirmed by those who were there and honoured by those who weren’t. Why is it so hard for us to believe our own stories or begin to process them without corroborating witnesses appearing from the shadows of the past, or without people stepping forward with open arms when echoes of those stories present themselves again in the present?”

— Sarah Polley

39. “Human beings are basically a disaster.”

— Sarah Polley

40. “Please don’t ever apologize for having a reasonable response to something difficult.”

— Sarah Polley

41. “His love was all around the edges, but sometimes it was hard for both of us to see, I think.”

— Sarah Polley