“I do not think there is a solitary second when my mind is not completely buried in you... I am like a mad thing... I am never not thinking of you. You are all over me, in sorrow or in joy, all of the time-- O, yes, in drunkenness too, in conversation, in work, with every breath and heartbeat." --Laurence Olivier to Vivien Leigh, in 1939.
You post so much good stuff in this thread @MissAdventurous. I really relate to the Lillian Gish quote. I want what she wanted.
In her prime I would have let Lillian Gish break my heart on the daily. I had a crush on her when I was 8 when the local UHF television station ran silent movies every Saturday night. She mesmerized me.
One of the few actors from that era that left a quote. The rest were silent because that’s what their craft demanded.
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. ~Anne Lamott
"The only way to look at anger is with bewilderment. It's not real; it's not about anything but fear. It's like finding a unicorn in the kitchen. You back up, walk out, and go back in based in reality. Anger and fear are fictions."- -Marian Seldes
Making the decision to have a child - it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.
Elizabeth Stone
To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they're too exhausted to be any longer. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out, to become speedily found when they are lost.
But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.
~ Heidi Priebe
Just read this in The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
🤣🤣🤣🤣
@Spud424 That was beautiful and heart-rending.
~ Sunset Snuggles
There was a delicate piece of paper tucked into a legal pad in Tennessee's hotel room. The paper was a light blue and bore a tiny, elegant handwriting: reading it required concentration. The letter addressed Tennessee as "Mr. Williams," then this followed:
“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.
"Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.
"Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.
"No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”
"This was written by Reinhold Niebuhr, and I send it to you with all good wishes."
The letter was on the private stationery and bore the signature of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
"He helped me," Tenn continued, "to realize that everyone in 'Streetcar' was right to fight for what they needed. The human need to survive is honorable; others may be destroyed, but everyone would understand that survival, its beauty and its fragility, received top priority. He saw the most touching moment in that play to be when Stella lies to Blanche as she is about to be led away to the hat factory.
'I'll go with you,' Stella says, but of course both realize the lie. She will not be there, and how many walks have we taken alone, when we begged for company and support? The need is to get Blanche out of the house and their lives so that their own lives can begin their own descent into fantasy: fantasy that will help them live with themselves--just as Blanche, just as I, have our fabulist devices to cope.
That scene was the play, in Kazan's eyes. And he was right. And he cried like a baby every time he saw it."--Tennessee Williams on Elia Kazan
Laughter is the best medicine
There is truth to this. And when you are looking up at the ceiling in your dying moment people will not be sad because they will think you are looking for the joke that went over your head.
True story.
Mary Wollstonecraft was born on April 27, 1759, in London. She was a writer, philosopher, and advocate for women's rights. Until the late 20th century, her unconventional personal life received more attention than her writing. Today, Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her works as important influences.
During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.
After two ill-fated affairs with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay (by whom she had a daughter, Fanny Imlay), Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement.
After Wollstonecraft's death in 1797, her widower published a memoir of her life, revealing her unorthodox lifestyle, which inadvertently destroyed her reputation for almost a century. However, with the emergence of the feminist movement at the turn of the twentieth century, Wollstonecraft's advocacy of women's equality and critiques of conventional femininity became increasingly important.
Wollstonecraft died at the age of 38, 11 days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Shelley, who would become an accomplished writer and the author of Frankenstein.
Portrait of Mary by John Opie, c. 1797
Just a few that remind me I am strong when life gets a bit too hard, and a bonus from my own writing to put it all in perspective. Let light shine on you today and rain help your flowers to grow.
"They may forget your name but they will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou
"To do what nobody else will do, in a way that nobody else can do, in spite of all we go through ... that is what it is to be a nurse.” – Rawsi Williams
"I am prouder of my years as a single mother than of any other part of my life." -J.K. ROWLING CountryLiving
“My tragedies have taught me, Even the sunflower needs the rain to grow.” -JesiDee