Women Born In The 1940s

"Poems are for the livin', that's what I know."

"I want to know/who will decide our fate?/You, or I, or WE together?/Will I be free to discover my own path?"

"The inner life has no boundaries"

"Climb the stairway of your imagination"

"See for yourself/the you inside no one else can see."

"Take off the mask. Discard it."

"How I love to listen./Remind myself there is more to the world./How I have learned to grow from it."

"Intelligence and feelings forming alliances for seeing."

"We are infants compared to the universe"

"Diners seek in each bite, the flavor that takes them back to their childhood and the dishes that, with the passage of time, they stopped consuming."

"Brethren, this is the time anybody will need grace more than ever before. ‎"

"There is real danger in losing call of God"

"Go to your pastor first to consult for marriage before your parents"

"Don’t marry a girl who is lazy! Don’t marry a girl who cannot cook, she needs to know how to do chores and cook because you cannot afford to be eating out all the time"

"I like to think of smiling as a cause not an effect. Smile all the time."

"There's a lot that we keep inside that's starts very early for most us, if you look at kids, kids are for the most part very expressive, they yell, they scream, they cry, they say whatever they feel, they like to play, they like to pretend, they get mad, they cry easily, and it's not about being about that again, but it's that kind of freedom, that kind of spontaneity that often we loose early on because we're shut down by experiences that hurt, by people who can't stand that kind of intensity that children have and try to get them to shut up and behave."

"God was right behind me, making me strong to build my character, to be good and not bad. I prayed never to hurt people like that. The other thing I did was to visualize myself happy in the future, and that gave me strength. God does not give you glory and goodness all your life; you have to grow and learn."

"The fact is, as actors, everything we do, bad or good, is a contribution. To me, it is a positive thing to give people as wide a range of human behavior with some sense of understanding of that behavior or some clue to it. It may be a very small thing in terms of the problems that exist in the world, but it is a thing, and it's something I can do, and like to do—am thrilled to do actually."

"a lot of actors, we create a backstory of our own in our heads and we often relate it to our intimates in the film, say my husband. But it just depends on how actors want to work."

"It wasn't difficult to retire. I have friends who have a family life and do their art and make it work. I realized I couldn't give myself to both, and I really wanted to make a life with my husband, so that's what I did."

"When the fan magazines started wanting to take pictures of me making sandwiches for my husband, I said no. You know there are tribes in Africa who believe that a camera steals a little part of your soul, and in a way I think that's true about living your private life in public. It takes something away from your relationships, it cheapens them."

"Editing is a lot about patience and discipline and just banging away at something, turning off the machine and going home at night because you're frustrated and depressed, and then coming back in the morning to try again."

"When you're a film-maker you become addicted, your family suffers, your friends suffer, to say nothing of what's going on on the set. It's an incredible way to show the impulse to view. Directors are constantly looking."

"I think Marty's use of violence is very valid. He never uses it gratuitously, he always makes a very strong point….if you're going to show violence and it's done with conviction the way Marty does it then it is correct."

"Ah, but they aren't violent until I've edited them."

"You get to contribute so significantly in the editing room because you shape the movie and the performances," she says. "You help the director bring all the hard work of those who made the film to fruition. You give their work rhythm and pace and sometimes adjust the structure to make the film work – to make it start to flow up there on the screen. And then it's very rewarding after a year's work to see people react to what you've done in the theater."

"Teaching, good teaching, is a remarkable gift which I highly revere. One of the saddest things that has happened to education, I feel, is the loss of respect and honor once given to educators as professionals…"

"I ultimately left with my family's blessing. I didn't really realize at the time how final that trip was for me. I think Texas is beautiful and there is a part of the Lone Star State that I will always carry with me. I am very proud of being Tex/Mex. The difficult part for me was being a very aware child while growing up in Texas in the '50's and '60's. Racism was prevalent. I felt it and saw it in big ugly ways and I felt it and saw it in subtle, painful injustices that affect me to this day…"

"Most trained actors can pick up a scene and give it a good sturdy first read, but a few coaching sessions does not a trained actor make - a lesson which has stayed with me ever since."

"When I arrived in Los Angeles and began going on auditions, I was never considered for Latina roles. I was "ethnic" but not decidedly Latina looking. If they were hiring a Latina to play a Latina, they wanted her to "look like a Latina" e.g. high cheek bones, dark skin and a mane of black hair. Well, I just couldn't get arrested by casting directors as a Latina. I think this led to the realization that I was going to have to blaze a trail for myself because I didn't fit into one particular "type."…"

"…When I was 47 I returned to modelling (Ed: for Revlon as well) and I asked that my photos shouldn’t be retouched. Women stopped me on the street and told me that for a long time they felt ignored and invisible and seeing me in magazines made them feel that they weren’t invisible anymore…"

"They have a lot of sayings in Charleston (Hutton's hometown), and one of them is, "beauty is as beauty does." And in order to stay alive and make a bunch of money, I had to hopefully do both. But I had to let the beauty thing go. Beauty is as beauty does."

"I was attracted to money. I was attracted to the idea of doing what I wanted to do, which was not being a little Southern girl like little Southern girls were for the last, you know, 300 years, but to instead see what it was like to go all over the world and what it was like to be with different people in different places and to see what their lives were like..."

"…I looked the word up in the dictionary – I have had little formal instruction, what I know I have learned by reading, travelling, picking the right friends and the right lovers – and I told myself that I have always persevered..."

"Let me state here and now that the Black woman in America can justly be described as a "slave of a slave.""

"Once you have caught a glimpse of freedom or experienced a bit of self-determination, you can't go back to old routines that were established under a racist, capitalist regime."

"The new world we are attempting to create must destroy oppression of any type. The value of this new system will be determined by the status of the person who was low man on the totem pole."

"Those who are exerting their "manhood" by telling Black women to step back into a domestic, submissive role are assuming a counter-revolutionary position."

"Since the advent of Black power, the Black male has exerted a more prominent leadership role in our struggle for justice in this country. He sees the system for what it really is for the most part. But where he rejects its values and mores on many issues, when it comes to women, he seems to take his guidelines from the pages of the Ladies' Home Journal."

"I was born into a class that did not live in its native language. I was born into a city that feared its future, and trained me for emigration."

"Bharati Mukherjee once said that every immigrant must feel powerful because he or she can reinvent one's own past. We see this happen all the time it is a unique opportunity to gain some kind of self-confidence or a better self-image. So in a sense, we are reinventing our own vision and reinventing our past."

"She has been called the grande dame of diasporic Indian literature, and her relationships with the others in the group are at times complex. Two men in particular engage her attention. She wrote in 1989, "our collective experience is mirrored in the works of two magnificent writers: V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. Either-following Naipaul-we are less than fully human, pathetic trained monkeys, mimic men; or we are miraculous translations, Lamarckian mutations, single lives that have acquired new characteristics and recapitulated the entire cultural history of our genotype." Naipaul was an early model for Mukherjee, but her attitude toward him changed after she and Robert Boyers interviewed him in 1979. She spoke at length to me about the evolution of her relationship with Naipaul and his work. She continues to teach certain of his novels even while rejecting his worldview and politics. Salman Rushdie, on the other hand, is a writer whom she has greatly admired, going so far as to publish an homage to him titled "Prophet and Loss: Salman Rushdie's Migration of Souls" in the Village Voice Literary Supplement in March 1989"

"My theme is the making of new Americans"

"my true material is immigration. In other words, transformation not preservation."

"Writers (especially American writers, weaned on the luxury of affluence and freedom) often disavow the notion of a "literary duty" or "political consciousness," citing the all-too-frequent examples of writers ruined by their shrill commitments. Glibness abounds on both sides of the argument, but finally I have to side with my "Third World" compatriots: I do have a duty, beyond telling a good story or drawing a convincing character. My duty is to give voice to continents, but also to redefine the nature of American and what makes an American. In the process, work like mine and dozens like it will open up the canon of American literature."

"I have been blessed with an enormity of material. I can be Chekhovian and Tolstoyan-with melancholy and philosophical perspectives on the breaking of hearts as well as the fall of civilizations-and I can be a brash and raucous homesteader, Huck Finn and Woman Warrior, on the unclaimed plains of American literature."

"The most moving form of praise I receive from readers can be summed up in three words: I never knew. Meaning, I see these people (call them Indians, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese) around me all the time and I never knew they had an inner life."

"my literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show how I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) have transformed America. The agenda is simply stated, but in the long run revolutionary. Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar."

"I am an American. I am an American writer, in the American mainstream, trying to extend it. This is a vitally important statement for me-I am not an Indian writer, not an exile, not an expatriate. I am an immigrant; my investment is in the American reality, not the Indian. I look on ghettoization-whether as a Bengali in India or as a hyphenated Indo-American in North America as a temptation to be surmounted. It took me ten painful years, from the early seventies to the early eighties, to overthrow the smothering tyranny of nostalgia. The remaining struggle for me is to make the American readership, meaning the editorial and publishing industries as well, acknowledge the same fact. (As the reception of such films as Gandhi and A Passage to India as well as The Far Pavillions and The Jewel in the Crown shows, nostalgia is a two-way street. Americans can feel nostalgic for a world they never knew.)"

"Literature can help bring about change of hearts and minds and then put pressure for political, legislative change. (2007)"