QuotesCosmos
Anne V. Coates "The hand that rocks the cradle", The Independent (London, 19 November 1998), p. 12
• Coates, who was the film editor on Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980), did not take up the suggestion.
“

It was curious, so much was in his mind, but he didn't talk about what he was doing, so it was difficult sometimes to follow. He's quite a macabre person. He said to me one day: "You should take the kids to the London Hospital and look at all the freaks in the bottles, the two-headed babies." The actual Elephant Man was in there. He said: "You'll really enjoy it. Take some sandwiches and make a day of it."

— Anne V. Coates on David Lynch

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "It was curious, so much was in his mind, but he didn't talk about what he was doing, so it was difficult sometimes to follow. He's quite a macabre person. He said to me one day: "You should take the kids to the London Hospital and look at all the freaks in the bottles, the two-headed babies." The actual Elephant Man was in there. He said: "You'll really enjoy it. Take some sandwiches and make a day of it."" in the context of "Anne V. Coates "The hand that rocks the cradle", The Independent (London, 19 November 1998), p. 12
• Coates, who was the film editor on Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980), did not take up the suggestion." to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Quote Image
Source: Wikiquote: "David Lynch" (Quotes about Lynch) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 19, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app

Tags

#Anne V. Coates#sandwiches#difficult#sometimes#twoheaded#hospital#elephant#curious#macabre#bottles#follow#person
Anne V. Coates

About Anne V. Coates

Anne Voase Coates OBE (12 December 1925 – 8 May 2018) was a British film editor with a more than 60-year-long career. She was perhaps best known as the editor of David Lean's epic film Lawrence of Arabia (1962), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing. Coates was nominated on four other occasions for the Oscar, the other motion pictures being Becket (1964), The Elephant Man (1980), In the Line of Fire (1993) and Out of Sight (1998). In an industry where women accounted for only 16 per cent of all editors working on the top 250 films of 2004, and 80 per cent of the films had absolutely no women on their editing teams at all, Coates thrived as a leading film editor. She was awarded BAFTA's highest honour, a BAFTA Fellowship, in February 2007 and was given an Academy Honorary Award, which are popularly known as a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, in November 2016 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.