The Quotable Jewish Woman: Wisdom, Inspiration and Humor from the Mind and Heart

ACTORS, COMEDIANS

& PERFORMERS

(also see Humor & Comedy and Show Biz, Sports & Entertainment)

With all the Jewish comics in the world, how come Israel doesn’t have a Laughing Wall?

—LOTUS WEINSTOCK, The Lotus Position, 1982

Fame for a comedian is like a degree to a doctor. You can’t practice without it.

—LOTUS WEINSTOCK, Stand-up routine

Actors may know how to act, but a lot of them don’t know how to behave.

—CARRIE FISHER, Postcards from the Edge, 1987

In the theater I was always at ease, but in pictures there was the camera following me around like a cop.

—FANNY BRICE in The Fabulous Fanny by Norman Katkov, 1953

I want to be known as an actress. I’m not royalty.

—ELIZABETH TAYLOR in Elizabeth by Dick Sheppard, 1974

Unfortunately, I am involved in a freedom ride protesting the loss of the minority rights belonging to the few remaining earthbound stars. All we demanded was our right to twinkle.

—MARILYN MONROE, Telegram to Mr. and Mrs. Robert Kennedy, 13 June 1962

You can never count anybody out in this business. I’ve seen actors with careers deader than my mother’s brisket come back to life and win Academy Awards.

—RITA RUDNER, Tickled Pink, 2001

I don’t think an actor should be afraid to be unlovable—particularly in comedy; you have to be willing to look like a fool.

—MADELINE KAHN in Drama-Logue, 1984

[The Divine Miss M is] an exaggeration of all the things I never thought I wanted to be. Though I tell you, since I’ve started doing her I’ve become much more like her than I ever thought was possible.

—BETTE MIDLER in Women in Comedy, Martin, 1986

Women come in here and sit at the tables up front, and I can hear them whispering, Oh, she’s so dirty! She’s so dirty! Well, if they’re so pure, how the hell do they know what I’m talking about? People want to know where I learn all these words. I went to a grammar school one day and went up to the bathroom. There they were, right on the wall.

—PEARL WILLIAMS in Funny Women, Unterbrink, 1987

I started off as a moron in Kiss Them for Me, worked my way up to imbecile in Adam’s Rib, and have carved my current niche as a noble nitwit [in Born Yesterday].

—JUDY HOLLIDAY in Women in Comedy, Martin, 1986

I love Baby Snooks, and when I play her I do it as seriously as if she were real…. I am Snooks. For twenty minutes or so, Fanny Brice ceases to exist.

—FANNY BRICE, Women in Comedy, Martin, 1986

Being a funny person does an awful lot of things to you. You feel that you mustn’t get serious with people. They don’t expect it from you, and they don’t want to see it. You’re not entitled to be serious, you’re a clown, and they only want you to make them laugh.

—FANNY BRICE in The Fabulous Fanny by Norman Katkov, 1953

There is not one female comic who was beautiful as a little girl.

—JOAN RIVERS in Los Angeles Times, 10 May 1974

I’m a woman who’s a comic, not a woman’s comic.

—ELAYNE BOOSLER in Women in Comedy, Martin, 1986

He often said I was the greatest no-talent star in the business.

—GYPSY ROSE LEE, Gypsy, 1957

I’m the last of the truly tacky women. I do trash with flash and sleaze with ease.

—BETTE MIDLER in Funny Women, Unterbrink, 1987

A career is born in public—talent in privacy.

—MARILYN MONROE, Quoted by Gloria Steinem in The First Ms. Reader, 1972

Listen, my name’s Barbra Streisand. With only two a’s. In the first name, I mean. I figure that third a in the middle, who needs it.

—BARBRA STREISAND in Streisand: Her Life by James Spada, 1995

When I’m performing I’m not afraid of anything or anybody. But when I’m just me I have this fright of being a disappointment to people.

—BARBRA STREISAND in Streisand: Her Life by James Spada, 1995

My singing is very therapeutic. For three hours I have no troubles—I know how it’s all going to come out.

—BEVERLY SILLS, Interview, CBS-TV, 1975

As more of us [actresses] are moving into producing and directing, the level of creativity among women has become very high, and therefore our relationships have changed—have themselves become more creative.

—LEE GRANT in Ms., November 1975

Every now and then, when you’re on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It’s a sound you can’t get in movies or in television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you’ve hit them where they live.

—SHELLEY WINTERS in Theatre Arts, June 1956

The thing that I find fun about performing is telling stories and creating characters.

—JUDY KAYE in Broadway’s Favorite Diva by Sheryl Flatow, Playbill magazine, n.d.

I take a breath when I have to.

—ETHEL MERMAN in Time, 27 February 1984

ADVERTISING, IMAGE &

THE MEDIA

(also see Books, Writers & Poetry and Money, Business & Economics)

Packaging is all heaven is.

—EVE BABITZ, Eve’s Hollywood, 1974

When we look at the Empire State Building or the Washington Monument, nobody yells Penis! We are used to seeing the world through male images, not our own likenesses.

—JUDY CHICAGO in Exposures, Brown, 1989

I do have this quality that is very childlike. But how long can it last? How long can you be cute?

—GOLDIE HAWN in Women in Comedy, Martin, 1986

All I have to do is remember to be dumb when I’m out, and smart when I’m home.

—JUDY HOLLIDAY in Women in Comedy, Martin, 1986

All the cosmetics names seemed obscenely obvious to me in their promises of sexual bliss. They were all firming or uplifting or invigorating. They made you tingle. Or glow. Or feel young. They were all prepared with hormones or placentas or royal jelly. All the juice and joy missing in the lives of these women were to be supplied by the contents of jars and bottles.

—ERICA JONG, How to Save Your Own Life, 1977

We’re a public that is brought up on deception, through advertising…. We’re accustomed to being deceived. We allow ourselves to be deceived. Advertising is really responsible for a lot in the deterioration of American public perceptions.

—BARBARA TUCHMAN in A World of Ideas by Bill Moyers, 1989

Don’t we realize we’re a business, we single girls are? There are magazines for us, special departments in stores for us. Every building that goes up in Manhattan has more than fifty percent efficiency apartments…for the one million girls who have very little use for them.

—GAIL PARENT, Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York, 1972

Is it my imagination, or is everything becoming too hard to open? These days, even to get inside a box of cookies you have to be a safecracker. I have music CDs I’ve been trying to open for years. I use them as coasters.

—RITA RUDNER, http://www.ritafunny.com, 2003

I would like to become president of a major TV network, and then I would ban all commercials that make women look like imbeciles—that would mean 24 hours of uninterrupted programming.

—ROBIN TYLER, Stand-up routine

Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than at each other.

—ANN LANDERS, Advice Column

Women’s magazines are precisely the formula for unsatisfying male-female relations. Men can never meet the exaggerated expectation that they will provide all meaning, content, and purpose in women’s lives. Women can never meet the exaggerated expectation (their own and those of men) that they will be eternally beautiful, young, pliable and pleasing.

—RIANE EISLER, Sacred Pleasure, 1995

The media is still dominated by men, many of whom think of women in a very sexist way. They cover them in a sexist way, and they do not cover them because of sexism.

—GLORIA ALLRED in Perspectives, Fall 1996

Spin, incidentally, was a relatively new term for what Leonard used to call bullshit.

—RITA RUDNER, Tickled Pink, 2001

Everyone wants edge these days. You tell them it’s edgy, they love it.

—JUDY BLUME, Summer Sisters, 1998

Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution. Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it.

—SUSAN SONTAG, On Photography, 1977

Growing up female in America. What a liability! You grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, advice columns, whoreoscopes, Hollywood gossip, and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas. What litanies the advertisers of the good life chanted at you! What curious catechisms!

—ERICA JONG, Fear of Flying, 1973

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.

—SUSAN SONTAG, AIDS and Its Metaphors, 1989

The mail grew me up in a hurry.

—ANN LANDERS in Time, 21 August 1989

With publicity comes humiliation.

—TAMA JANOWITZ in International Herald Tribune, 8 September 1992

AGE & AGING

From birth to age eighteen, a girl needs good parents. From eighteen to thirty-five, she needs good looks. From thirty-five to fifty-five, she needs a good personality. From fifty-five on, she needs good cash.

—SOPHIE TUCKER, Remark, 1953

I’m forty-nine but I could be twenty-five except for my face and my legs.

—NADINE GORDIMER, Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants, Not for Publication and Other Stories, 1965

Say no to the fountain of youth and turn on the fountain of age.

—BETTY FRIEDAN, Speech, Quoted in Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 30 January 1993

Language is a boxing match in which we must spar daily, warding off the negative suggestions that age is our worst enemy. Indeed, it is our best friend.

—ELAINE BERNSTEIN PARTNOW, Breaking the Age Barrier, 1981

Thank God for the head. Inside the head is the only place you got to be young when the usual place gets used up.

—GRACE PALEY, Later the Same Day, 1985

You know you’re getting old, when your back starts going out more than you do.

—PHYLLIS DILLER in Earl Wilson’s Broadway column, 8 September 1978

One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.

—GERTRUDE STEIN, The Crack-Up, Edmund Wilson, ed., 1945

I have always felt that a woman had the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passed into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.

—HELENA RUBINSTEIN, My Life for Beauty, 1966

The two women gazed out of the slumped and sagging bodies that had accumulated around them.

—NADINE GORDIMER, Vital Statistics, Not for Publication and Other Stories, 1965

But it’s hard to be hip over thirty

When everyone else is nineteen

—JUDITH VIORST, It’s Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty…, 1968

That’s what I want to be when I grow up, just a peaceful wreck holding hands with other peaceful wrecks.

—TILLIE OLSEN, Hey Sailor, What Ship?, Tell Me a Riddle, 1960

Being seventy is not a sin.

—GOLDA MEIR in Reader’s Digest, July 1971

We need to break through the age mystique by continuing to grow, solving problems, making social changes. We need to see our age as an uncharted adventure.

—BETTY FRIEDAN, Speech, Quoted in Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 30 January 1993

Oh, my God. I’ve just told you how old I am. Nobody knows how old I am. I’m going to have to kill you now.

—RITA RUDNER, Tickled Pink, 2001

With my mother age is a disguise; she puts it on with a wink. (Some wink.) But with my father it is another matter altogether. Age is revealing him; the essential in him; completing the job.

—BETTE HOWLAND, Things to Come and Go, 1983

The older we get, the more extraordinary life becomes—and the more amazing our capacity to experience its fullness.

—RABBI SHIRA MILGROM, Four Centuries, 1992

The older I get the funnier I get…. Think what I’ll save in not having my face lifted.

—PHYLLIS DILLER in Women in Comedy, Martin, 1986

Age is a subjective experience, as is time.… A moment of ecstasy may seem to last beyond its objective measurement on the clock, so may days or weeks of idleness appear to vanish without a trace. It is the same with age—for what is age but time?

—ELAINE BERNSTEIN PARTNOW, Breaking the Age Barrier, 1981

A lemon tree, like everything else, has a chronological age. But what are the ages of the lemons it bears? Each has its own age. So it is with us. The fruits we bear during infancy are quite different from those of adolescence. The varying seasons of early, middle, and late adulthood all blossom anew, bearing fresh fruit, green fruit that needs ripening.

—ELAINE BERNSTEIN PARTNOW, Breaking the Age Barrier, 1981

Growing up means letting go of the dearest megalomaniacal dreams of our childhood. Growing up means knowing they can’t be fulfilled. Growing up means gaining the wisdom and the skills to get what we want within the limitations imposed by reality—a reality which consists of diminished powers, restricted freedoms and, with the people we love, imperfect connections.

—JUDITH VIORST, Necessary Losses, 1986

…So yeah, anyway—I’m thirty-four and my mother is desperate for me to get married. She thinks settling down is what you should be doing at thirty-four. How would she like it if I turned to her the day she hits eighty and said: ‘Hey, Mum—when are you going to break your hip? All your friends are breaking theirs’?

—SUE MARGOLIS, Spin Cycle, 2001

Most old people are disheartened to be living in the ailing house of their bodies, to be limited physically and economically, to feel an encumbrance to others—guests who didn’t have the good manners to leave when the party was over.

—BARBARA WALTERS, How to Talk with Practically Anybody about Practically Anything, 1970

Before I lost my mother, she told me her greatest fear was being a burden to her children. Nothing, nothing I could say could ease her concern. Her dignity was at stake. So for the sakes of all our moms and dads who have reached the golden years, let’s get them a benefit that means something, that’s straightforward and not confusing, a benefit that they can trust—a true Medicare benefit.

—BARBARA BOXER, Radio Address, 21 June 2003

All of us, ultimately, will join one of the most despised, neglected and abused groups in [American] society.

—GERDA LERNER, Why History Matters, 1997

I have no patience with anyone born after World War II. You have to explain everything to these people.

—SELMA DIAMOND in Funny Women, Unterbrink, 1987

Old people can be fun if they’re not yours.

—EMILY LEVINE, Stand-up routine

The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a disinterested judgment but a terror-ridden refusal to be hooked into the, if you will, ecological chain of breathing, growing, and dying. It is the demand, in other words, to remain children.

—MIDGE DECTER, The New Chastity, 1972

It’s hard for a young girl to have patience for old age sitting and chewing all day over the past.

—FANNIE HURST, Cosmopolitan, 1917

At age 11, girls are sure of what they know. But at 12 or 13, when they take on the feminine role, they become uncertain. They begin to say, I don’t know. Their true selves go underground…. We women become ourselves again after 50. When the feminine role is over, we re-emerge.

—GLORIA STEINEM in Parade magazine, 17 May 1992

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do. You can’t stop the plane, you can’t stop the storm, you can’t stop time. So one might as well accept it calmly, wisely.

—GOLDA MEIR, Quoted by Oriana Fallaci in L’Eurepeo, 1973

If anything is a surprise then there is not much difference between older or younger because the only thing that does make anybody older is that they cannot be surprised.

—GERTRUDE STEIN, Everybody’s Autobiography, 1937

Time, thou all kindly, confer upon me, at the ripeness of old age, mildness.

—BERTHA PAPPENHEIM, Prayers, I, Stephanie Forchheimer, tr., 1946

Asked if she worshiped regularly: Honey, at my age, I don’t do anything regularly.

—SELMA DIAMOND in Funny Women, Unterbrink, 1987

All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation…. You have no respect for anything.

—GERTRUDE STEIN, A Moveable Feast, 1964

What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations…is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of being able to change things by one’s own efforts.

—HANNAH ARENDT, Crises of the Republic, 1972

Aging is a man’s destiny, something that must happen because he is a human being. For a woman, aging is not only her destiny…it is also her vulnerability.

—SUSAN SONTAG in Saturday Review, October 1971

Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.

—MURIEL SPARK, Memento Mori, 1959

Why can’t we build orphanages next to homes for the elderly? If someone’s sitting in a rocker, it won’t be long before a kid will be in his lap.

—CLORIS LEACHMAN in Good Housekeeping, October 1973

One’s prime is elusive. You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full.

—MURIEL SPARK, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1961

Asked for the key to her longevity at 80: Keep breathing.

—SOPHIE TUCKER, Speech, 13 January 1964

ANTI-SEMITISM

(also see Jews & Judaism and Racism, Sexism & Other Prejudices)

The word Jew is in constant use, even among so-called refined Christians, as a term of opprobrium, and is employed as a verb, to denote the meanest tricks.

—EMMA LAZARUS in Century, February 1883

Ever since I was a little girl I remember my father telling me that I had a passion for justice. But I think it was really a passion against injustice which originated from my feelings of the injustice of anti-Semitism.

—BETTY FRIEDAN in Lilith 1, No. 1, 1976

How many great Jewish ideas and ideals died behind the walls of ghettoes during the Middle Ages even before seeing the light of day, or behind the invisible ghetto walls of modern Jewry?

—HANNAH SENESH, Hannah Senesh, 1966

Anti-Semitism is a criminal weapon used against society by the unsuccessful, the bigoted, the depraved, the ignorant, the neurotic, the failures. It thrives on terror, hunger, unemployment, hate, resentment. It is mob psychology displayed at its lowest and most unreasoning.

—EDNA FERBER, A Peculiar Treasure, 1939

I shall not be bitter if others fail to grasp what is happening to us Jews. I work and continue to live with the same conviction and I find life meaningful—yes, meaningful.….

—ETTY HILLESUM, An Interrupted Life, 1983

The nature of the Jew is governed by the same laws as human nature in general. In England, France, Germany and the rest of Europe (except, Spain), in spite of the barbarous treatment and deadly persecution they have suffered, they have lived and spread and outlived much of the poisonous rancor and prejudice against them, and Europe has been none the worse on their account.

—ERNESTINE LOUISE ROSE, (c. 1860), American Jewish Historical Society, http://www.ajhs.org, 2003

Every time I hear Poland described reductively as an anti-Semitic country, I bridle in revolt, for I know that the reality is far more tangled than that.

—EVA HOFFMAN, Exit Into History, 1993

Jews are the specter haunting Eastern Europe these days…an absence that is itself felt as a presence, a wrongness…. Perhaps, if we don’t always have a conscious conscience, we have a subliminal one, from which the memory of past wrongs is not so easily erased.

—EVA HOFFMAN, Exit Into History, 1993

It’s enough the gentiles have stopped trying to tear down Judaism and left the job to Jews, who do it better.

—JOANNE GREENBERG, Children of Joy (1966), Shaking Eve’s Tree, 1990

That every Jew in the world was alive through a miracle. That since Egypt’s Pharaoh, persecutors had tried to do to Jews what Hitler was now trying to do in Europe. Before Hitler, I was an innocent, convinced that some day there would be no more nationalism, no more racism, no more anti-Semitism. Hitler had taught me I was wrong. I became a Hitler Jew with three thousand years of history.

—RUTH GRUBER, Haven, 1983

One of the fundamentals of Zionism is the realization that anti-Semitism is an illness which can neither be fought against with words, nor cured with superficial treatment. On the contrary, it must be treated and healed at its very roots.

—HANNAH SENESH, Hannah Senesh, 1966

ARTISTS, THE ARTS &

CREATIVITY

(also see Celebrities, Heroes & Sheroes and Show Biz, Sports & Entertainment)

After some years in the art world trying to pretend I wasn’t a woman, I decided for better or worse I had to be who I was.

—JUDY CHICAGO in Exposures, Brown, 1989

I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.

—FRIDA KAHLO in Frida, Herrera, 1983

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.

—DIANE ARBUS in Diane Arbus, Patricia Bosworth, 1985

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.

—DIANE ARBUS, Diane Arbus, 1972

The camera is a kind of license.

—DIANE ARBUS, Diane Arbus, 1972

One’s art adjusts to economic necessity if your metabolism does.

—LEE GRANT in New York Times, 12 August 1973

Art destroys silence.

—ALICIA SUSKIN OSTRIKER, The Eighth and Thirteenth, The Little Space, 1998

Art always seems to be catching up to life.

—LEE GRANT in Ms., November 1975

I think art, literature, fiction, poetry, whatever it is, makes justice in the world. That’s why it almost always has to be on the side of the underdog.

—GRACE PALEY in Ms., March 1974

I don’t end [my dances], because I don’t feel there’s any ending…. That’s the Jew in me. Ask the world a question, and there’s no answer. All I do is present what I feel, and you, you answer. You answer.

—ANNA SOKOLOW in Jewish Women’s Archive ( http://www.jwa.org), 20 August 2003

He visited the Museum of Modern Art, and was standing near the pool looking at his dark reflection when a curator of the museum noticed him. My, my, what a fine work of art that is! the curator said to himself. I must have it installed immediately.

—ROSALYN DREXLER, The Cosmopolitan Girl, 197g5

I’d rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than to have anything to do with these artistic bitches of Paris. They sit for hours on the cafés warming their precious behinds, and talk without stopping about culture art revolution and so forth thinking themselves the gods of the world…. Gee whiz!

—FRIDA KAHLO in Frida, Herrera, 1983

The great thing about the AIDS NAMES quilt is that everybody and their brother and sister made those pieces without any thought of whether they had talent. You have art giving you a healing process. You have art giving you redemption.

—MIRIAM SCHAPIRO in Parade magazine, 1998

Every work of art is an act of faith in the vernacular sense of being a venture into the unknown. The artist must dive into waters whose depths are unplumbed, and trust that he or she will neither be swallowed up nor come crashing against a cement surface four feet down, but will rise and be buoyed upon them.

—DENISE LEVERTOV, Work That Enfaiths, New and Selected Essays, 1992

Art…means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner-table of power which holds it hostage.

—ADRIENNE RICH in Ms., November/December 1997

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist’s relation to bread and blood…. The song is higher than the struggle.

—ADRIENNE RICH, Blood, Bread, and Poetry, 1986

I want you to know, dear children, that there does not exist in the whole world a single teacher who is capable of teaching art. To do that is truly impossible.

—FRIDA KAHLO in Frida, Herrera, 1983

Authors and actors and artists and such

Never know nothing, and never know much.

—DOROTHY PARKER, Bohemia, Sunset Gun, 1928

There is nothing fiercer than a failed artist. The energy remains, but, having no outlet, it implodes in a great black fart of rage which smokes up all the inner windows of the soul.

—ERICA JONG, Fear of Flying, 1973

Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.

—ERICA JONG, The Artist as Housewife: The Housewife as Artist, The First Ms. Reader, 1972

A woman can make the choice to be an artist and decide to go all the way, but there is still tremendous guilt. You feel as though you’re stealing power.

—MIRIAM SCHAPIRO in Exposures, Brown, 1989

The artist should belong to his society, yet without feeling that he has to conform to it…. Then, although he belongs to his society, he can change it, presenting it with fresh feelings, fresh ideas.

—ANNA SOKOLOW in Jewish Women’s Archive (http://www.jwa.org), 20 August 2003

We have made a space to house our spirit, to give form to our dreams.

—JUDY CHICAGO in Womanspace, February/March 1973

If I can’t give birth to a live human being, I can give birth to the ideas and struggles within me.

—PENINA V. ADELMAN, Miriam’s Well, 1986

The painting is never what is there,

It throbs with the mystery

Of your own sick-to-death soul

Which demands, like everything alive,

Love.

—ALICIA SUSKIN OSTRIKER, From the Prado Rotunda: The Family of Charles IV and Others, The Little Space, 1998

I never knew I was a Surrealist till André Breton came to Mexico and told me I was.

—FRIDA KAHLO in Frida, Herrera, 1983

I paint myself because I am so often alone, because I am the subject I know best.

—FRIDA KAHLO in Frida, Herrera, 1983

Obviously the good lady [melody] has a tough constitution. The more attempts made against her, the more she blooms with health and rotundity. It is interesting to note that all those accused of being her murderers are becoming, in turn, her benefactors and saviors.

—WANDA LANDOWSKA, Why Does Modern Music Lack Melody? (9 February 1913), Landowska on Music, 1964

Music of the past has become a distant and vague country where everything is totally different from our surroundings, our life, our art, our impressions, and our concepts.

—WANDA LANDOWSKA, Music of the Past (1905), Landowska on Music, 1964

I don’t want to be an exhibitionistic coloratura who merely sings notes. I’m interested in the character.

—BEVERLY SILLS in Divas, Sargeant, 1959

The fate of a song that had become part of folklore is inscrutable.

—RAISA DAVYDOVNA ORLOVA, Memoirs, 1983

It hurts me not to love music, because I feel my spirit is hurt by not loving it. But there’s nothing to be done about it; I shall never understand music, and never love it. If I occasionally hear music I like, I can’t remember it; so how could I love a thing I can’t remember.

—NATALIA GINZBURG, He and I, Italian Writing Today, 1967

Drumming is a celebration of numbers—dividing time with sounds to reveal the wonderful cycles and numerical relationships that exist in the universe.

—RAQUY DANZIGER, Note to author, December 2003

That’s the advantage of playing in a band with girls. As soon as a bloke gets a guitar in his hands he’s unbearable.

—JUSTINE FRISCHMANN, Elastica limits by Andrew Smith, Observer, 10 March 2002

But I cannot help it if, having never stopped working, I have learned a great deal, especially about this divine freedom that is to music the air without which it would die. What would you say of a scientist or of a painter who, like stagnant water, would stop his experimentation and remain still?

—WANDA LANDOWSKA, Letter to a Former Pupil (1950), Landowska on Music, 1964

In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

—SUSAN SONTAG, Against Interpretation, 1966

Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.

—SUSAN SONTAG, Against Interpretation, 1966

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

—SUSAN SONTAG, On Photography, 1977

Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in a wardrobe, where you were sure of finding shirts.

—FRIDA KAHLO in Frida, Herrera, 1983

But, in the end, I believe that to be a creative person and not to be able to express it in your own terms is difficult, and eventually intolerable, for any human being anywhere.

—FAY KANIN in American Women Playwrights, Shafer, 1995

It’s my feeling that the highest aspiration of the [screen] writer is to be a writer-executive in the sense that he goes on to control his material in one further aspect by producing or directing it. I believe every writer who can should try to accomplish that. Because it’s the best way he can get his work done well.

—FAY KANIN in American Women Playwrights, Shafer, 1995

While other [film] crafts have to sit around chewing their fingernails waiting for a movie to be put together, writers have one great strength. They can sit down and generate their own employment and determine their own fate to a great extent by the degree of their disciplines, their guts, and their talents.

—FAY KANIN in The Screenwriter Looks at the Screenwriter by William Froug, 1972

BEAUTY & APPEARANCE

(also see Fashion & Shopping and Food, Drink & Diet)

You’re not pretty, Miriam-mine, so you better be smart. But not too smart.

—MARGE PIERCY, Small Changes, 1973

Brainy women had a special obligation to look particularly chic and sexy, she believed, and she prided herself on never looking like a teacher or a librarian.

—SHARON NIEDERMAN, A Gift for Languages, Shaking Eve’s Tree, 1990

They just elected me Miss Phonograph Record of 1966. They discovered my measurements were 33¹⁄3, 45, 78!

—PHYLLIS DILLER, Stand-up routine

There’s nothing moral about beauty.

—NADINE GORDIMER, The Late Bourgeois World, 1966

Beauty is here to stay. Beauty doesn’t vanish. We do.

—BETTE HOWLAND, Things to Come and Go, 1983

Re her visit to the beauty parlor: I was there five hours—and that was just for the estimate.

—PHYLLIS DILLER, Stand-up routine

Re beauty tips: Why do you listen to her [Arlene Dahl]? Chances are you’ll never look like her. Better you should listen to me because the chances are you will look like me.

—TOTIE FIELDS, Stand-up routine

There are some implausible standards out there. It’s really sad when I spend time with girls who are 11 years old and think they’re fat.

—JENNIFER CONNELLY in A Mind of Her Own by Jane Gardner, NW magazine, March 2002

There should be more diversity. There are all different kinds of beauty in the world. I mean, why aren’t mothers glorified? Instead, sex goddesses are glorified!

—JENNIFER CONNELLY in A Mind of Her Own by Jane Gardner, NW magazine, March 2002

I break all the rules and wear everything. Ruffles, ostrich feathers, fox coats. You look fat in fox anyway, so if you start fat, you only look a little fatter.

—TOTIE FIELDS in Funny Women, Unterbrink, 1987

She has more chins than a Chinese phone book.

—JOAN RIVERS, Stand-up routine

With a heavy French accent: Why do I have no wrinkles at 40? Because I never move a muscle in my face.

—LOTUS WEINSTOCK, Stand-up routine

It’s very important to emphasize what is good or beautiful so as not to have a gloomy face when you meet some youngster who has begun to guess.

—GRACE PALEY, Just As I Thought, 1998

Sometimes this face looks so funny

That I hide it behind a book

Sometimes this face has so much class

That I have to sneak a second look.

—PHOEBE SNOW, Either or Both, Phoebe Snow, 1973

Plastic surgery must be like childbirth without the child, Eva reasoned. After a while, if you’re satisfied with the results, you forget the pain and want to do it again.

—RITA RUDNER, Tickled Pink, 2001

If I’da known you [the audience] were going to be on both sides of me I’d have gotten my nose fixed.

—BARBRA STREISAND in Streisand: Her Life by James Spada, 1995

On having plastic surgery: No woman on the stage today can afford to have a nose that is likely to keep on growing until she can swallow it.

—FANNY BRICE in Funny Woman by Barbara W. Grossman, 1991

I’ve always been proud of the Jews, but never so proud as tonight because tonight I wish I had my old nose back.

—JEAN CARROLL, Stand-up routine

The psychic scars caused by believing you are ugly have a permanent mark on your personality.

—JOAN RIVERS in Los Angeles Times, 10 May 1974

At this time of my life, age thirty-seven, the only thing I had to do about gray hair was extract one strand at a time, but I already had plans to eradicate one irritating vertical crease between my eyebrows. I’d read in Elle about this magical remedy, Botox. A little shot of botulism. No beau of mine would ever boast, Lily doesn’t wear a lick of makeup.

—DELIA EPHRON, Big City Eyes, 2000

The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.

—NAOMI WOLF, The Beauty Myth, 1990

Women have face-lifts in a society in which women without them appear to vanish from sight.

—NAOMI WOLF, The Beauty Myth, 1990

There are no ugly women, just lazy ones.

—HELENA RUBINSTEIN, My Life for Beauty, 1966

Someday, when I’m awfully low,

When the world is cold,

I will feel a glow just thinking of you

And the way you look tonight.

—DOROTHY FIELDS, The Way You Look Tonight, Swing Time (film), 1936

BOOKS, WRITERS & POETRY

(also see Advertising, Image & the Media; Communication; and Stories & Myths)

Books go out into the world, travel mysteriously from hand to hand, and somehow find their way to the people who need them at the times when they need them…. Cosmic forces guide such passings-along.

—ERICA JONG, How to Save Your Own Life, 1977

Throughout all history, books were written with sperm, not menstrual blood.

—ERICA JONG, Fear of Flying, 1973

First they make something, then they murder it. Then they write a book about how interesting it is.

—GRACE PALEY, The Long-Distance Runner, The Collected Stories, 1994

Sometimes I try my hand at turning out small profundities and uncertain short stories, but I always end up with just one single word: God.

—ETTY HILLESUM, An Interrupted Life, 1983

A real writer tells the truth, and that’s how he changes the world.

—LILIAN NATTEL, The River Midnight, 1999

The word is my fourth dimension.

—CLARICE LISPECTOR, Profile by Rachel Gutierrez, Carla Sherman, tr., http://www.vidaslusofonas.pt (Lives of the Portuguese-Speaking World), 2000

One way or another the book had entered upon a new phase in its existence…. The total alienation of the product from its author had been accomplished. The book had become a grown-up daughter off on her continental tour, without so much as a look over her shoulder or a thought to spare for her old mother left to fend for herself at home.

—EUGENIA GINZBURG, Within the Whirlwind, 1979

I hear the books in all the rooms

breathing calmly

—DENISE LEVERTOV, August Daybreak, Breathing the Water, 1989

The novel…depended on the pretense of objectivity to lend it the status of truth: a little world seen full and clear.

—HARRIET ROSENSTEIN, Reconsidering Sylvia Plath The First Ms. Reader, 1972

Routine, disposable novels, able to provide relief or distraction but not in themselves valuable—like the smoked cigarette, the used whore, the quick drink—are exactly suited to the conventions of their consumers.

—CAROLYN G. HEILBRUN, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny, 1973

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

—DOROTHY PARKER in Algonquin Wits, Robert E. Drennan, ed., 1968

A novel is like the physicist’s premise of an expanding universe…. A play is just the reverse.

—CYNTHIA OZICK, "Old Hand as Novice,’’ Fame and Folly, 1996

I did not choose this subject; it had long ago chosen me…. I only knew that I had lived through something which was considered central to the lives of women…a key to the meaning of life; and that I could remember little except anxiety, physical weariness, anger, self-blame, boredom, and divisions within myself.

—ADRIENNE RICH, Of Woman Born, 1976

The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

—RENATA ADLER, Toward a Radical Middle, 1969

A poem does invite, it does require. What does it invite? A poem invites you to feel. More than that: it invites you to respond. And better than that: a poem invites a total response.

—MURIEL RUKEYSER, The Life of Poetry, 1949

The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.

—MURIEL RUKEYSER, The Life of Poetry, 1949

poetry can be quite dangerous propaganda,

especially since all worthwhile propaganda

ought to move its readers like a poem.

Graffiti do that; so do some songs,

and rarely, poems on a page.

—ROBIN MORGAN, Introduction, Sisterhood Is Powerful, 1970

the true nature of poetry. The drive

to connect. The dream of a common language.

—ADRIENNE RICH, Origins and History of Consciousness, The Dream of a Common Language, 1978

I see the life of North American poetry at the end of the century as a pulsing, racing convergence of tributaries—regional, ethnic, racial, social, sexual— that, rising from lost or long-blocked springs, intersect and infuse each other while reaching back to the strengths of their origins.

—ADRIENNE RICH, What Is Found There, 1993

Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.