Gish's Quotes

#1. What scares me? I kind of believe in ghosts. I believe they can wander around, so that scares me. But the stuff that really scares me are the catastrophic events like my husband or children or my family being harmed, or something like that. - Author: Annabeth Gish

#2. Lillian Gish thought that there should be a cabinet position for the arts and I think she was right. I think she was right. - Author: Fay Wray

#3. Now, evolution is the substance of fossils hoped for, the evidence of links not seen. - Author: Duane T. Gish

#4. What's more, he was going to have a full American breakfast with bacon and eggs, none of this continental bullshit. - Author: Gish Jen

#5. I like people to come back and tell me what I did wrong. That's the kindest thing you can do. - Author: Lillian Gish

#6. That there should be a purpose to suffering, that a person should be chosen for it, special - these are houses of the mind, in which whole peoples have found shelter. - Author: Gish Jen

#7. I think that there is a bias in the current literary climate, which is not only very Western but very male. - Author: Gish Jen

#8. Lillian Gish may be a charming person, but she is not Ophelia. She comes on stage as if she had been sent for to sew rings on the new curtains. - Author: Mrs. Patrick Campbell

#9. I like to listen. I'm much more interested in listening than in speaking, for sure. - Author: Gish Jen

#10. Hollywood has turned into an emotional Detroit. - Author: Lillian Gish

#11. He looked at me like Lillian Gish coming out of a swoon.
"Is this Bertie Wooster talking?" he said, pained.
"Yes, it jolly well is!"
"Bertie, old man," said Bingo, patting me gently here and there, "reflect! We were at school - "
"Oh, all right! - Author: P.G. Wodehouse

#12. You know, when I first went into the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather. Later he played my father and finally he played my husband. If he had lived I'm sure I would have played his mother. That's the way it is in Hollywood. The men get younger and the women get older. - Author: Lillian Gish

#13. What you get is a living, what you give is a life. - Author: Lillian Gish

#14. When I think about why I would be a writer, why I should continue to be a writer, it seems to me one of the few things you can dowhere you're never bored. - Author: Gish Jen

#15. The stage was our school, our home, our life. - Author: Lillian Gish

#16. He was like a nation in crisis, looking back, and back and back - its history might be ugly, but its past shone perfect. - Author: Gish Jen

#17. Young man, if God had wanted you to see me that way, he would have put your eyes in your bellybutton. - Author: Lillian Gish

#18. I'm trying to give people an idea of what black looks like and what white looks like before I introduce them to gray. - Author: Gish Jen

#19. There is ... a big aspect of play in writing novels, and making the story more and more elaborate is just more and more fun. - Author: Gish Jen

#20. We do not know how God created, what processes He used, for God used processes which are not now operating anywhere in the natural universe. This is why we refer to divine creation as special creation. We cannot discover by scientific investigations anything about the creative processes used by God. - Author: Duane Gish

#21. I never approved of talkies. Silent movies were well on their way to developing an entirely new art form. It was not just pantomine, but something wonderfully expressive. - Author: Lillian Gish

#22. I thought comedians had to have black on their faces or red beards. - Author: Dorothy Gish

#23. Gish was the best representation of where we were at the time. - Author: Billy Corgan

#24. My parents called me their wise little baby. I was mature when I was 4 or 5. My brother and sister were older, so I was raised by four adults. - Author: Annabeth Gish

#25. I hate to generalize because there are always so many exceptions to any rule. - Author: Gish Jen

#26. Evolution is a fairy tale for grown-ups. - Author: Duane Gish

#27. Hollywood - an emotional Detroit. - Author: Lillian Gish

#28. A happy life is one spent in learning, earning, and yearning. - Author: Lillian Gish

#29. Why, O Gish, does thou run about?
The life that thou seekest, thou wilt not find. - Author: Anonymous

#30. Of course he bothers me. He's my husband. - Author: Gish Jen

#31. I am pretty scare-able. I guess that is why I like doing horror because my imagination can take me places. - Author: Annabeth Gish

#32. Whatever I do in life, I'm almost always aware that there's another way to do it. - Author: Gish Jen

#33. Everything went downhill after Lillian [Gish] left me. - Author: D.W. Griffith

#34. A white person was by definition somebody. Other people needed, across their hearts, one steel rib. - Author: Gish Jen

#35. Nothing about 'Brotherhood' is ever wrapped up in a nice package. - Author: Annabeth Gish

#36. You can get through life with bad manners, but it's easier with good manners. - Author: Lillian Gish

#37. Anything is possible. A man is what he makes up his mind to be. - Author: Gish Jen

#38. I never cease to wonder at my luck in having for my sister the woman who, more than any other woman in America, possesses all the qualities of true greatness. - Author: Dorothy Gish

#39. He was not what he made up his mind to be. A man was the sum of his limits: freedom only made him see how much so. America was no America. - Author: Gish Jen

#40. I can't remember a time when I wasn't acting, so I can't imagine what I would do if I stopped now. - Author: Lillian Gish

#41. Plain boiled food, plain boiled thinking. Even his name is plain boiled: John. Maybe because I grew up with black bean sauce and hoisin sauce and garlic sauce, I always feel something is missing when my son-in-law talk. - Author: Gish Jen

#42. A man was the sum of his limits; freedom only made him see how much so. - Author: Gish Jen

#43. So, of course, Gish's presentation was well received, which it would have been the case had he only gotten up and said "praise the Lord" and sat back down. - Author: Michael Shermer

#44. I'm no relation to Lillian or Dorothy Gish. Not even way back. But when I first became interested in acting, I wrote a letter to Lillian Gish. She wrote back, discouraging me from entering the business. - Author: Annabeth Gish

#45. I mean what good does it do anyone to kill themselves working, because the worms will get you in the end. - Author: Dorothy Gish

#46. Many women tend toward the interdependent end of things, we tend to see ourselves in relationship to others to a far greater degree than men. - Author: Gish Jen

#47. Do you know New York stifles me? It makes me so unhappy. There are so many things I want, and so many things I cannot afford to have. I don't see how people ever have money enough to live here. - Author: Dorothy Gish

#48. Chinese language tends to be quick, economical. To know what people are saying, you always need to know what the context is. - Author: Gish Jen

#49. One left; things shifted in one's absence; one returned to something else. Time frustrated all. There was no sneaking past its rough guard, even to get to one's own yard of intimacies. - Author: Gish Jen

#50. A part of being an actress that is sort of frustrating is that the writers get to tell you about your character. - Author: Annabeth Gish

#51. It's human to hear stories and to know how people live and to imagine how that is for them. It's very interdependent! - Author: Gish Jen

#52. Never get caught acting. - Author: Lillian Gish

#53. As long as you are curious, you will never be bored. - Author: Lillian Gish

#54. There's nothing about interdependence that would keep somebody from making art. - Author: Gish Jen

#55. The older I get, the more I believe in what I can't explain or understand, even more than the things that are explainable and understandable. - Author: Lillian Gish

#56. If the next record is no better than Gish, then we've failed. - Author: Billy Corgan

#57. It had been drilled into us that when an audience pays to see a performance, it is entitled to the best performance you can give.Nothing in your personal life must interfere, neither fatigue, illness, nor anxiety
not even joy. - Author: Lillian Gish

#58. These are ideas that work for many, and that may well reflect your true understanding of life. - Author: Gish Jen

#59. Neither evolution nor creation qualifies as a scientific theory. - Author: Duane Gish

#60. I've never been in style, so I can't go out of style. - Author: Lillian Gish

#61. The independents are the ones who tend to commit suicide. I'm not against this way of being in the world. Individuals have brought us many treasures. You can't just say that's a bad way of being in the world - it's not. But it's not everyone's way of being in the world. - Author: Gish Jen

#62. We buy things we do not need to impress people we do not like. - Author: Arthur Gish

#63. I'd like to make people who see me in comic pantomime on the screen feel the way Mark Twain makes his readers feel. - Author: Dorothy Gish

#64. For students who are in the most creative group in America to somehow be presumed to be narrow is just completely meshugga. - Author: Gish Jen