Women Born In The 1920s

"They say it gives wrinkles but I am lucky no wrinkle…(laughter). Laughter Cheers you more when you are angry before you blow up. Smile more and laughter refreshes not just the soul but the way you look on the outside."

"I love music. I love classical music. That was the thing that first brought us (my husband and me) together. My husband loved classical music and I still do. I have a library in Ibadan for the collection of classical music."

"It is the grace of God. Also, if God gives you the grace to live long, you have to work hard too. There should also be a lifestyle adjustment. It is a gift of God. You can’t rule out the efficacy of prayers."

"No, I didn’t remarry. Before he died, I had retired from the university and was in Abeokuta as Chairman of Ogun State Teaching Service Commission and was in charge of all the primary and secondary schools in the state."

"I met my husband when I came back from Britain. One of my old teachers at Yaba Higher College saw me and was very happy I was back from the UK. I was not married. The teacher said he was going to introduce me to whom he considered as “the most famous bachelor in town”. He did and it was Ayo Ogunsheye – he was then a teacher and Assistant Secretary of Nigeria Union of Teachers. I attended a seminar and we (my husband and I) met. The day we met, it was like I met an old friend. It was fantastic. We started talking as if we had always known each other. He was wonderful. When we met later, I read his papers and critiqued them. It was fantastic. We loved each other when we were together but unfortunately, he died suddenly about 40 years ago. Since his death, God has continued to support me."

"While preparations were being made for my surgery, I kept praying. Surprisingly, the surgeons came two days before the surgery to examine me and check if my pulse had increased as it was very low prior to that time. I was sleeping when they came. They woke me up. When they tested me, they saw that my pulse had gone up to 80 and the surgeons shouted in awe.They said they did not believe my pulse would improve that much. In fact, the surgeons said they had to return my money and everything. They returned my money and never performed the operation again. I am still alive till today – I have been going from strength to strength. God has been so kind and wonderful in my life."

"In the last 10 years, they have not.I will advise the government to formulate a national policy to support the elderly in our society, whether they are educated or uneducated. The elderly have contributed to the development of the country one way or the other. Not only that, I can tell you that old age is very expensive. To keep fit, the health of the elderly must be fully supported by the government."

"Well, it was more exciting in the 60s and 70s because interest was very high to the extent that we trained librarians in line with the country’s professional agitations. I was one of those who started a book on professional agitations and I made sure that when we did the national policy implementation, I was in the committee and it was said that no educational institution could be set up without having a library. Then, I went to do a master’s degree programme in library science in the US. I was conscious of the fact that we needed intellectual resources in our country. We should make sure that children have a library."

"More or less, I taught myself, and that was what happened with many of the first teachers in the university. I started a postgraduate programme from University of London (master’s programme) and I supervised 11 PhD holders and so many master’s degree candidates for several years before I retired."

"I became a professor in 1973 when the university librarian started a library school in UI and they asked me to come and talk about how to organise maps. After talking about that, they said they would like me to move over and start a library because then we were taking the promotion exams of the UK and (they) wanted us to establish an academic programme. So, I went to Boston, United States, and did a master’s programme in librarianship and then came back and started the Department of Library Studies in Ibadan. I started the first programme except postgraduate and master’s degree programmes in Ibadan."

"Yes, it is true. There is no doubt about it because I made the first professorship and I sat on the Senate for the appointment of subsequent professors. The first two professors came from Ibadan and I was the first female professor in Nigeria in any discipline at all. I got it in Library Studies."

"[H]eavy load of his far-from-dead past, which was beginning to seem like an albatross around my neck."

"The word "actress" has always seemed less a job description to me than a title."

"I traveled in a world that once was—Hollywood of the war and immediate postwar years. And I existed in a world that never is—the prison of the mind. If what I have learned from these experiences can be summed up in one sentence, it would be this: life is not a movie. But I do not make that point in a sad or regretful way. I can only wonder, if my life had been a movie, would a director have cast Gene Tierney to play the part? The bitter with the sweet makes for a better part."

"I learned that carrying on while you're broken is not the answer. I tried to work harder and harder, thinking that work would cure everything. All it did was make things worse."

"As long as I was playing someone else, I was fine. When I had to be myself, my problems began."

"Jealousy is, I think, the worst of all faults because it makes a victim of both parties."

"Wealth, beauty, and fame are transient. When those are gone, little is left except the need still to be useful, even though the parts get fewer."

"Many women of my generation, in many fields, had good reason to be grateful to the women's colleges."

"A fetus is no more a human than an acorn is a tree"

"The God of Indian devotion - bhakti who responds to the same eternal needs of the human heart as exists anywhere else, never detaches himself wholly from the immanence of the world. He is personal and endowed with feelings only in the eyes of popular piety; to thought he reveals himself both far beyond and within at the same time; he reveals it as much as he hides it; and each man is in himself in some sort a manifestation of God."

"I don't know. Just walk. Just walk. My daughter Dinah just found out that a book she’s written, a novel, is being published. It’s very exiting. Maybe we’ll get to go to some great New York bookstore once everything’s back and see it up their on the shelves. That would be fun to walk to."

"I’m in my 90s and it’s lovely to have any of my films appreciated."

"For an actor, you sometimes have to say yes to these type of jobs. Especially when you get older, and are a woman."

"I knew my career as an actor would change. I wouldn’t get these parts again. I had reached the age where Hollywood begins to humiliate beautiful women. I wasn’t going to do it. Walking up there, I could almost feel myself accepting that change."

"The work she did in the film was very sensitive. There was something in her character that struck a chord with her. I found her fascinating."

"Learn how to be a waiter."

"I don’t use a typewriter or a computer, so everything was written by pen and ink by my little desk. It took me four years to complete it, and as you can see, it wasn’t an easy book to write."

"I think the most important impetus in life, is that it not be boring. The fear of boredom drove me more than any yearning for something I wanted to achieve."

"I had 12 years to make up for. I'm a very practical person. I had to support myself, I had to support my daughter, and I had to work. And if the way that I could work was to have the years taken off my age at that time, I was desperate to do it. I had to be able to go from one job to another and be pretty. And I achieved that for a good long time. I made up those 12 years."

"It was like, one day you were an actress who could do anything, and the very next day, you could not work in film or television again. And that was the temper of the times."

"I was a bird imitating the birds. And so it was their kind of imaginary world that I was raised in, and it was part delicious and part confusing."

"The 1950s and early '60s were emotionally rough for me. In 1950, when I was 23, I was named a Communist by Red Channels, an anti-Communist pamphlet, and was blacklisted by Hollywood from 1952 until the early 1960s."

"There are many roads to good acting, I've been asked repeatedly what the key to acting is, and as far as I'm concerned, the main thing is to keep the audience awake."

"Cast throughout her career in supporting roles, Stapleton was content not playing a lead character, I don't think she ever had unrealistic aspirations about her career."

"Not nearly as exciting as it would be if I were acknowledged as one of the greatest lays in the world."

"I figure you're a successful actress only when you don't have to work."

"I want to thank Troy, N.Y. … and everybody I ever met in my entire life."

"You have to know the insane odds, but you have to have the energy to buck them. You don't know if you're going to get a job anyway, so why give yourself the extra added handicap of dying if you don't play St. Joan?"

"Family is the best thing I’ve ever had. My family is my life. There’s something primitive in your feeling about family,"

"A houseboat is my speed, I’m usually frightened in anything that moves. A rougher than expected trip up the Hudson with friends this summer, scared the hell out of me. But I still haven’t learned how to stop it."

"No one was killed among those I took in. I fearlessly confronted Interahamwe whenever they would want to enter my enclosure to kill. I warned them that if they entered they would face the anger and incur the wrath of Nyabingi (a powerful spirit in folklore)."

"You can not die, you can not give up, we can defeat these evil people."

"She risked her life to save others. And to do that, she only had to improvise: she faced armed gangs with her full body and intellect and she won. Her story is a reminder that humanity prevails - even in the most difficult situations."

"One day, President Paul Kagame visited our village and said if everyone was a witch doctor like me, genocide could not have happened."

"Money could not cost me lives of Rwandans."

"If they are to die, I die with them."

"During the genocide, I saw the darkness of a man's heart. I remember one Saturday, they came back again, I confronted them as usual, warning them that by killing the refugees in my house, they were digging their own graves."

"Love is the most important thing. Find someone to love and the future will always be bright."

"They [the Interahamwe] killed my firstborn, my son Hanganimana; and my other daughter, Ugiriwabo, was poisoned and died. People would mock me, saying, ‘You hid people, but your own children were killed,’ and I replied to them, saying, ‘Our days to pass away are not the same. God is the only one who understands why these things happen.’"