I can honestly say – and it’s a big surprise to me – that I have never had a dream about being on the moon.
I don’t think of myself as a poor deprived ghetto girl who made good. I think of myself as somebody who from an early age knew I was responsible for myself, and I had to make good.
When I look back on my life, I wonder how I survived – my mother said I had a guardian angel.
A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.
I grew up in Oklahoma and Missouri, and I just loved film. My folks would take us to the drive-in on summer nights, and we’d sit on the hood of the car. I just had this profound love for storytelling.
During the Great Depression, African Americans were faced with problems that were not unlike those experienced by the most disadvantaged groups in society. The Great Depression had a leveling effect, and all groups really experienced hard times: poor whites, poor blacks.
I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.
Actually, I didn’t start sweating until I had children.
If you love something let it go free. If it doesn’t come back, you never had it. If it comes back, love it forever.
I suppose I had always been an unconscious suffragist. With my temperament and my surroundings, I could scarcely have been otherwise.
Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before.
People were saying that David Geffen and I had gotten married and it just blew me away. Not that they thought I was gay, but that they thought I could land a guy that hot.
The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.
I ain’t ever had a job, I just always played baseball.
Family life was wonderful. The streets were bleak. The playgrounds were bleak. But home was always warm. My mother and father had a great relationship. I always felt ‘safe’ there.
Continuing a Lenten series on prayer: Prayer is co-operation with God. It is the purest exercise of the faculties God has given us – an exercise that links these faculties with the Maker to work out the intentions He had in mind in their creation.
In life, if you stay quiet, you’ll get left behind. So I had to learn to be more vocal and outgoing.
I had rather be first in a village than second at Rome.
My mother loved children – she would have given anything if I had been one.
I had to bring myself back down to being a normal person again.
Since God had commanded it, it was necessary that I do it. Since God commanded it, even if I had a hundred fathers and mothers, even if I had been a King’s daughter, I would have gone nevertheless.
‘Changes in Latitudes’ began when I was looking at a photograph of a sea turtle swimming underwater. I had such a strong feeling for the beauty of this ancient creature, at home in the sea. On the spot, I wanted to swim with that turtle. I began to imagine a character who would do just that.
You gotta do what you gotta do. And I had to figure that out, and I used to – I couldn’t stand the media, but I realized they have a job. They gotta do what they have to do.
It was a woman who drove me to drink, and I never had the courtesy to thank her for it.
Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, ‘What shall we do with the Negro?’ I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us.
Life is filled with detours and dead ends, trials and challenges of every kind. Each of us has likely had times when distress, anguish, and despair almost consumed us.
I suffer from low self-esteem. I had horrible self-esteem growing up. You really have to save yourself because the critic within you will eat you up. It’s not the outside world – it’s your interior life, that critic within you, that you have to silence.
I really like battle ropes. They’re so versatile; you can get a terrific workout doing a ton of different exercises with them. My clients like them because they’re a good way to get aggression out, too. Had a bad day? Take it out on the ropes!
The only good political movement I’ve seen lately was Occupy Wall Street. They had no leaders, which was genius. But unfortunately it always ends up with some hippy playing a flute.
No matter how bad things are, they can always be worse. So what if my stroke left me with a speech impediment? Moses had one, and he did all right.
I’ll never, ever be full. I’ll always be hungry. Obviously, I’m not talking about food. Growing up, I had nothing for such a long time. Someone told me a long time ago, and I’ve never forgotten it, ‘Once you’ve ever been hungry, really, really hungry, then you’ll never, ever be full.’
If we had no faults of our own, we should not take so much pleasure in noticing those in others.
I was born in Faridabad but brought up in Delhi and Mumbai. My father had been living hand-to-mouth and literally slept on railway platforms when he came to Mumbai for the first time to become a film singer. My parents were both singers; they sang together and fell in love due to their singing.
It keeps me humble just to know exactly where I came from and all the hard work I had to put in to be here. It feels good to reminisce about the past.
I’ve done some analysis of the biblical stories as part of my psychological work. I knew that I had more to do, and every time I’ve done it, it’s been extremely valuable. It makes me a better teacher because I have a richer understanding of cultural history.
Religion, in any form, is always interesting to me because of how powerful it is. Not even the religion itself, but to the people that follow it… The effect that it has had on people’s minds.
What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.
My mom and I have always been there for each other. We had some tough times, but she was always there for me.
I had seen people who had lost everything and everyone they loved to war, famine, and natural disasters.
I would wear the blue overalls of the fieldworker and often wore round, rimless glasses known as Mazzawati teaglasses. I had a car, and I wore a chauffeur’s cap with my overalls. The pose of chauffeur was convenient because I could travel under the pretext of driving my master’s car.
To be treated well in places where you don’t expect to be treated well, to find things in common with people you thought previously you had very, very little in common with, that can’t be a bad thing.
I’m not a hockey fan, which is probably why I had to leave Canada in the first place.
I wasn’t the first choice for the role of Danny Tanner. Betty White was. Not true, but there was another actor whom they had shot the pilot with.
The best time I ever had with Joan Crawford was when I pushed her down the stairs in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Today we did what we had to do. They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong.
My dad said, ‘Go to college and take whatever you want.’ So, I went to the University of Miami. When I got up to the line at registration, I saw that you had to take math and history. I said, ‘There’s no way I’m taking math and history.’ And right next to it was the line for the drama department.
To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.
I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
Even Napoleon had his Watergate.
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can. Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast.
There were times when close people… Some of my closest friends have left me. People hurt me, so everything fell apart. I didn’t feel like I had anyone on my side or anyone who could understand me. So that’s why I completely fell apart.
The chief symptom of adolescence is a state of expectation, a tendency towards creative work, and a need for the strengthening of self-confidence. Suddenly, the child becomes very sensitive to the rudeness and humiliations which he had previously suffered with patient indifference.
The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago… had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.
Stick to the classics, and you can’t ever go wrong. I see old ladies on the street who have fabulous style and realize it’s because they are probably wearing really classic items that they’ve had for years and years. I think if you find something that suits you, you should just stick to it.
