A Quote by Henry James

She carried within herself a great fund of life, and her deepest enjoyment was to feel the continuity between the movement of her own heart and the agitations of the world. For this reason, she was fond of seeing great crowds, and large stretches of country, of reading about revolutions and wars, of looking at historical pictures--a class of efforts to which she had often gone so far as to forgive much bad painting for the sake of the subject.
She sat leaning back in her chair, looking ahead, knowing that he was as aware of her as she was of him. She found pleasure in the special self-consciousness it gave her. When she crossed her legs, when she leaned on her arm against the window sill, when she brushed her hair off her forehead - every movement of her body was underscored by a feeling the unadmitted words for which were: Is he seeing it?
I found her lying on her stomach, her hind legs stretched out straight, and her front feet folded back under her chest. She had laid her head on his grave. I saw the trail where she had dragged herself through the leaves. The way she lay there, I thought she was alive. I called her name. She made no movement. With the last ounce of strength in her body, she had dragged herself to the grave of Old Dan.
The universal nature has no external space; but the wondrous part of her art is that though she has circumscribed herself, everything which is within her which appears to decay and to grow old and to be useless she changes into herself, and again makes other new things from these very same, so that she requires neither substance from without nor wants a place into which she may cast that which decays. She is content then with her own space, and her own matter, and her own art.
She emptied herself of Fabio and of herself, of all the useless efforts she had made to get where she was and find nothing there. With detached curiosity she observed the rebirth of her weaknesses, her obsessions. This time she would let them decide, since she hadn't been able to do anything anyway. Against certain parts of yourself you remain powerless, she said to herself, as she regressed pleasurably to the time when she was a girl.
Occasionally, on screen, Barbara [Stanwyck] had a wary, watchful quality about her that I've noticed in other people who had bad childhoods; they tend to keep an eye on life because they don't think it can be trusted. After her mother was killed by a streetcar, she had been raised in Brooklyn by her sisters, and from things she said, I believe she had been abused as a child. She had lived an entirely different life than mine, that's for sure, which is one reason I found her so fascinating. I think her early life was one reason she had such authenticity as an actress, and as a person.
Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to man's yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!
My mother started out by being a very good girl. She did everything that was expected of her, and it cost her dearly. Late in her life, she was furious that she had not followed her own heart; she thought that it had ruined her life, and I think she was right.
My mother didn't feel sorry for herself, she was left with no child support, no alimony at a very young age, with a child to raise, a high school education and she just figured it out. She didn't complain, she didn't rely upon government, she relied upon her own skill set, her own self confidence, her own drive in moxie and her own duty to me and her and she relied upon her family and her faith.
Yet there were times when he did love her with all the kindness she demanded, and how was she to know what were those times? Alone she raged against his cheerfulness and put herself at the mercy of her own love and longed to be free of it because it made her less than he and dependent on him. But how could she be free of chains she had put upon herself? Her soul was all tempest. The dreams she had once had of her life were dead. She was in prison in the house. And yet who was her jailer except herself?
So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love - loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exist.
She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves… They belonged to her her and were her own, and she entertained the conviction that she had a right to them and they they concerned no one but herself.
I value in the cat the independent and almost ungrateful spirit which prevents her from attaching herself to any one, the indifference with which she passes from the salon to the housetop. When we caress her, she stretches herself and arches her back responsively; but this is because she feels an agreeable sensation, not because she takes a silly satisfaction, like the dog, in faithfully loving a thankless master. The cat lives alone, has no need of society, obeys only when she pleases, pretends to sleep that she may see more clearly, and scratches everything on which she can lay her paw.
I'll just be your brother from now on." he said, looking at her with a hopeful expectation that she would be pleased, which made her want to scream that he was smashing her heart into pieces and he had to stop. "That's what you wanted, isn't it?" It took her a long time to answer, and when she did, her own voice sounded like an echo, coming from very far away. "Yes," she said, and she heard the rush of waves in her ears and her eyes stung as if from sand or salt spray. "That's what I wanted.
There was a warmth of fury in his last phrases. He meant she loved him more than he her. Perhaps he could not love her. Perhaps she had not in herself that which he wanted. It was the deepest motive of her soul, this self-mistrust. It was so deep she dared neither realise nor acknowledge. Perhaps she was deficient. Like an infinitely subtle shame, it kept her always back. If it were so, she would do without him. She would never let herself want him. She would merely see.
I think the great power of Bette Davis was she always knew who she was. She had an obligation to herself and her audience. When you think of what she was compelled to do, the power she put on the screen, the fact that she took upon herself a much greater task.
She had witnessed the world's most beautiful things, and allowed herself to grow old and unlovely. She had felt the heat of a leviathan's roar, and the warmth within a cat's paw. She had conversed with the wind and had wiped soldier's tears. She had made people see, she'd seen herself in the sea. Butterflies had landed on her wrists, she had planted trees. She had loved, and let love go. So she smiled.
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