Ava Gardner

“Deep down, I'm pretty superficial.”

“I don't understand people who like to work and talk about it like it was some sort of goddamn duty. Doing nothing feels like floating on warm water to me. Delightful, perfect.”

“I think the main reason my marriages failed is that I always loved too well but never wisely.”

“Some people say Liz and I are whores, but we are saints. We do not hide our loves hypocritically, and when in love, we are loyal and faithful to our men. [On the subject of her multiple marriages]”

“I suffered, I really suffered, with all three of my husbands. And I tried damn hard with all three, starting each marriage certain that it was going to last until the end of my life. Yet none of them lasted more than a year or two.”

“I couldn't imagine a better place [Australia] for making a film on the end of the world.”

“After my screen test, the director clapped his hands gleefully and yelled: "She can't talk! She can't act! She's sensational!"”

“Because I was promoted as a sort of a siren and played all those sexy broads, people made the mistake of thinking I was like that off the screen. They couldn't have been more wrong.”

“I have only one rule in acting: trust the director and give him heart and soul.”

Frances McDormand

“I'm a character actress, plain and simple... Who can worry about a career? Have a life. Movie stars have careers - actors work, and then they don't work, and then they work again.”

- Frances McDormand

Grace Kelly

As an unmarried woman, I was thought to be a danger.


Emancipation of women has made them lose their mystery.


For a woman, forty is torture, the end.


Getting angry doesn't solve anything.


I don't like yelling and fighting, and I can't quarrel.


I don't want to be married to someone who feels inferior to my success or because I make more money than he does.


I don't want to dress up a picture with just my face.


If anybody starts using me as scenery, I'll return to New York.


Other women looked on me as a rival. And it pained me a great deal.


The freedom of the press works in such a way that there is not much freedom from it.


Woman's natural role is to be a pillar of the family.


- Grace Kelly




Happy birthday, Grace.

Twiggy

I used to be a thing; I'm a person now.

The sixties were a time when ordinary people could do extraordinary things...!

I'm basically an up kind of person, not a depressive one. So whatever's happening, my head doesn't get that down and moody... I didn't get into a particularly swinging way of life, as the press would have liked to make out. We never went to parties because we hated them. I've really had a boring, ordinary life on the social level. I haven't been to all-night parties and I haven't had a million boyfriends and my favourite pastimes are still the same, sitting at home watching telly or going to a nice restaurant for dinner or having an evening at home sewing.

They called me an "elongated matchstick", "the original million-dollar baby doll". You were supposed to look like Brenda Lee, very curvy and round, pointed breasts and pointed toe shoes. In all these pictures of me around twelve I'm wearing a brassiere with Kleenex stuffed in it...Most of the pictures of me taken then, I hate now

What happened to me in the Sixties was so major and so worldwide and so huge, there's no way I can repeat it. But in a way, I had nothing to do with it, it just took me over. It was bizarre, it was weird, and I had no control over it. I don't think anyone could have planned what happened to me.

At sixteen, I was funny, skinny little thing, all eyelashes and legs. And then, suddenly people told me it was gorgeous. I thought they had gone mad.

Jane Seymour

“You have to count on living every single day in a way you believe will make you feel good about your life- so that if it were over tomorrow, you'd be content with yourself.”

“Music has brought me some of the highest moments of my life. I don't even hear the music. I don't even hear the notes. I'm not aware that someone has turned on a tape machine - I'm in another world.”

“Motherhood has relaxed me in many ways. You learn to deal with crisis. I've become a juggler, I suppose. It's all a big circus, and nobody who knows me believes I can manage, but sometimes I do.”

“Even though I make those movies, I find myself wishing that more of those magic moments could happen in real life.”

“You cannot do everything at once, so find people you trust to help you. And don't be afraid to say no.”

“Live each day the fullest you can, not guaranteeing there'll be a tomorrow, not dwelling endlessly on yesterday.”


- Jane Seymour

Marion Davies

"With me it was 5 per cent talent and 95 per cent publicity."

- Marion Davies

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I have drunken deep of joy, And I will taste no other wine tonight.


Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.


A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.


A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.


All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.


Change is certain. Peace is followed by disturbances; departure of evil men by their return. Such recurrences should not constitute occasions for sadness but realities for awareness, so that one may be happy in the interim.


Concerning God, freewill and destiny: Of all that earth has been or yet may be, all that vain men imagine or believe, or hope can paint or suffering may achieve, we descanted.


I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity.


Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry.


Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.


The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.


Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.


We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.


Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.


The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.


Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.


When my cats aren't happy, I'm not happy. Not because I care about their mood but because I know they're just sitting there thinking up ways to get even.


Familiar acts are beautiful through love.


Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.


- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Kate Winslet

“Life is short, and it is here to be lived.”

“I've been Skinny; it's fucking boring.”

“Loving someone is setting them free, letting them go.”

“Just because society, and government, and whatever was different 100 years ago, doesn't mean that people didn't have sex, pick their nose, or swear.”

“Mum and dad were very much friends, and up to life. There was no anxiety for anything when I was growing up, they just taught me to be me.”

“I wouldn't dream of working on something that didn't make my gut rumble and my heart want to explode.”

“I like exposing myself. There's not an awful lot that embarrasses me. I'm the kind of actress who absolutely believes in exposing herself.”

“There are moments to indulge and enjoy, but I always know when it's time to go home and wash my knickers.”


- Kate Winslet


(photo by Mario Testino)

Charlotte Rampling

"I am fascinated by the whole process of what it's like to be alive, whether it's unbelievably uncomfortable and horrible or whether it's quite nice."

"If words don't have vibration behind them, and a real feeling behind them, then they're just words."

"One of the reasons I don't see eye to eye with Women's Lib is that women have it all on a plate if only they knew it. They don't have to be pretty either."

"To grieve is something extremely difficult. We don't even know how to begin to grieve, and I don't know how you can be taught to grieve."

"You cannot watch yourself dispassionately."


- Charlotte Rampling

Anna May Wong

"Every time your picture is taken, you lose a part of your soul."

"I'm Anna May Wong. I come from old Hong Kong. But now I'm a Hollywood star."

"I've come to the conclusion that everybody should marry, including me."

- Anna May Wong

Eleanor Roosevelt

"A woman is like a tea bag--you never know how strong she is until you get her in hot water."

"Do what you feel in your heart to be right--for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't."

"It is not fair to ask of others what you are unwilling to do yourself."

"Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life."

"The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience."

"People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built."

- Eleanor Roosevelt

Cate Blanchett

“If I had my way, if I was lucky enough, if I could be on the brink my entire life—that great sense of expectation and excitement without the disappointment—that would be the perfect state.”

- Cate Blanchett