Ibsen is like this room where we are sitting, with all the tables and chairs. Do I care whether you have twenty or twenty-five lin...ks on your chain? Hedda Gabler, Nora and the rest: it is not that I want! I want Rome and the Coliseum, the Acropolis, Athens; I want beauty, and the flame of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"It's every woman's tragedy," said Nora,... "that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator." Mind you, we've kno...wn some lovely female impersonators, in our time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The field maneuvers may be different from those in Holmes's day, and the villain is more socially mobile, but since Sir Arthur we ...have not changed the three essential ingredients of the private eye. He must be a bachelor, with the bachelor's harum-scarum availability at all hours (William Powell's marriage to Myrna "Nora" Loy, a wistful concession to the family trade, fooled nobody). He must have an inconspicuous fund of curious knowledge, which in the end is always crucially relevant. He must pity the official guardians of the law. Of course, the twentieth century has grafted some interesting personality changes on the original. Holmes was an eccentric in the Victorian sense, a man with queer hobbies--cocaine was lamentable but pardonably melodramatic--whose social code was essentially that of the ruling classes. He was, in a way, the avenging squire of the underworld ready to administer a horsewhipping to the outcasts who were never privileged by birth to receive it from their fathers. Bogart is a displaced person whose present respectability is uncertain, a classless but well-contained vagabond who is not going to be questioned about where he came from or where he is going. ("I came to Casablanca for the waters." "But there are no waters in Casablanca." "I was misinformed.")LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Othello or Nora are definite, substantial figures created by the playwright. They can be played well or badly, and they can be "in...terpreted" in one way or another; but they most definitely exist, no matter who plays them or even whether they are played at all. The character in a film, however, lives and dies with the actor. It is not the entity "Othello" interpreted by Robeson or the entity "Nora" interpreted by Duse, it is the entity "Great Garbo" incarnate in a figure called Anna Christie or the entity "Robert Montgomery" incarnate in a murderer who, for all we know or care to know, may forever remain anonymous but will never cease to haunt our memories.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What did you hit her for? I'll let you in on something, she's a lush, the lady. After she bends the elbow a few times, she be...gins to see things. Rats, roaches, snakes, bats, you know. A sock in the kisser's the only thing that'll bring her out of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My consciousness-raising group is still going on. Every Monday night it meets, somewhere in Greenwich Village, and it drinks a lot... of red wine and eats a lot of cheese. A friend of mine who is in it tells me that at the last meeting, each of the women took her turn to explain, in considerable detail, what she was planning to stuff her Thanksgiving turkey with. I no longer go to the group.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Washington press corps thinks that Julie Nixon Eisenhower is the only member of the Nixon Administration who has any credibili...ty--and, as one journalist put it, this is not to say that anyone believes what she is saying but simply that people believe she believes what she is saying ... it is almost as if she is the only woman in America over the age of twenty who still thinks her father is exactly what she thought he was when she was six.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »