Quips and Quotations (Sexual Revolutionary Edition)

 

1940-2023

 

My family was very conservative, and I had a traditional upbringing. I was not brought up to be a sex symbol, nor is it in my nature to be one. The fact that I became one is probably the loveliest, most glamorous and fortunate misunderstanding.

--Raquel Welch

If a man were going to become a woman, he would want to become the most beautiful woman in the world. He would become Raquel Welch.

--Robert Fryer, producer of the film version of Gore Vidal's novel Myra Breckinridge

 I can't recall what Gore Vidal thought of Raquel Welch in Myra Breckinridge, his transgender comedy, though he wrote off the film itself as "an awful joke." The movie managed to piss off everyone including the White House which demanded that old clips of Shirley Temple be excised from the movie because it demeaned her position as a delegate at the United Nations. So it had that going for it. Still the film seems even more relevant to our time than the late 60s.

--Jeffrey St. Clair, journalist

Raquel and an up-and-comer

  

 Fame is a fickle food

Upon a shifting plate

--Emily Dickinson 

 

Quips and Quotations (National Poetry Month Edition)

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

--W. H. Auden

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these.

--T. S. Eliot

A word is dead when it is said, some say.
I say it just begins to live that day.

--Emily Dickinson

...who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish...

--Allen Ginsberg, Howl

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

--Walt Whitman

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

--Thomas Hardy

Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.

--from the movie Arthur (1981) screenplay by Steve Gordon.