what I think.
—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, world traveler and letter writer of the eighteenth century
In spite of honest efforts to annihilate my I-ity, or merge it in what the world doubtless considers my better half, I still find myself a self-subsisting and alas! self-seeking me.
—Jane Welsh Carlyle, one-half of very literary nineteenth-century marriage
Do what you are afraid to do.
—Mary Emerson, the righteous aunt of Ralph Waldo
Nothing is so pleasant as to display your worldly wisdom in epigram and dissertation, but it is a trifle tedious to hear another person display theirs.
—Ouida, luxury-loving novelist of nineteenth-century England
If you send up a weather vane or put your thumb up in the air every time you want to do something different, to find out what people are going to think about it, you're going to limit yourself. That's a very strange way to live.
—Jessye Norman, opera singer
By whom?
—Dorothy Parker, toast of the Algonquin Table, on being told that she was “outspoken”
A real diva would never scream at her guests to get out. She would ask her assistants to make the guests get out. This is one of the rules of divadom.
—Donatella Versace, an expert in the ways of her kind
The world is wide, and I would not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.
—Frances Willard, nineteenth-century social reformer, on learning to ride a bicycle
CHAPTER TWO
Love ‘n’ Lust ‘n’ Stuff
Brilliant, reclusive Emily Dickinson—at first blush, a truly improbable tease—slyly observed that her refusal to marry only piqued her suitor's desire. “Don't you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to language?” gloated the seductive (verbally, anyway) poet. Not, I hasten to add, that Dickinson's aloofness constituted a calculated strategy á la the Rules Girls. The truth is, the woman was so thoroughly averse to togetherness, romantic or otherwise, that she would sometimes converse only with those who agreed to remain in an adjoining room, or hidden behind a screen. Let's just say it must have seemed like a real milestone (and possibly proof of advanced metaphysical skills) to merely slip your arm around elusive Emily.
At the opposite end of the Love ‘n’ Lust continuum, let us place Joan Crawford, the sizzling screen queen, who might be said to have posted a metaphorical “We're Open!” sign on her boudoir door. As La Crawford explained, she found sex vital to maintaining her glowing complexion. One can easily imagine that the same tonic contributed to the peaches-and-cream visage of voluptuous Mae West, who intimated (though not, as it happens, entirely accurately) that she never married because “I would have had to give up my hobby.” But how, then, to account for the unblemished beauty of Sharon Stone, who once bitterly opined that “Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake whole relationships”? Obviously, one woman's hot affair is another's arid hell.
From clogged-pore commentary to hormonally turbo-charged talk, you're about to encounter an abundance of provocative positions. Just don't forget that a girl can obtain excellent skin care products at the drugstore, too.
If it has tires or testicles, you're going to have trouble with it.
—Linda Furney, U.S. politician
Personally, I like sex and I don't care what a man thinks of me as long as I get what I want from him—which is usually sex.
—Valerie Perrine, film attraction
I don't want to say that I want a man to like me for my mind, because that's going to sound like I think I'm Albert Einstein. But I would like someone who doesn't accuse me of making up words like “segue.”
—Mariah Carey, singer
I never married because I would have had to give up my favorite hobby.
—Mae West, self-styled sex goddess
Clinton lied. A man might forget where he parks or where he lives, but he never forgets oral sex, no matter how bad it is.
—Barbara Bush, former first lady
If there is anything disagreeable going on, men are sure to get out of it.
—Jane Austen, the perennially popular novelist
I have no patience with women who measure and weigh their love like a country doctor dispensing capsules. If a man is worth loving at all, he is worth loving generously, even recklessly.
—Marie Dressler, character actress of the thirties
I really detest movies like Indecent Proposal and Pretty Woman because they send a message to women that sleeping with a rich man is the ultimate goal—and really, that's such a small part of it.
—Laura Kightlinger, comic
I knew that the men I married were very attractive to the opposite sex: the twenty marriages they had between them proves that, if nothing else does.
—Ava Gardner, thrice-wed actress
If men knew what women laughed about, they would never sleep with us.
—Erica Jong, women's writer
Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets.
—Edna Ferber, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist
Impotent!
—Louise Colet, French journalist, describing a disappointing tryst in her diary
Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
—Iris Murdoch, bright light of Brit lit
It was not cold. There was a fire in the studio.
—Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon's black sheep sister, explaining why she was comfortable modeling minus clothes
Everybody should practice safe sex. ‘Cause nobody wants to be doing it and put an eye out.
—Emmy Gay, “Fusion Art” entertainer
My attitude toward men who mess around is simple: If you find 'em, kill ‘em.
—Loretta
