Gene Tierney Quotes

Trying to make order out of my life was like trying to pick up a jellyfish.

Throughout my career, I was to be cast as a frontier girl, an aristocrat, an Arabian, a Eurasian, a Polynesian, and a Chinese.

I suppose life is a little like that, isn't it, a message in a bottle pitched out to sea, to be carried by the winds and the tides, washing up on the beaches we could never imagine.

When I met Jack Kennedy, he was a serious young man with a dream. He was not a womanizer, not as I understood the term.

In the months leading up to World War II, there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently about the trouble in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening.

When my mood was high, I seemed normal, even buoyant. I felt smarter. I had secrets. I could see God in a light bulb

I admire anyone who rids himself of an addiction.

A romantic, I think, picks the rose and is careless with the thorn.

The things we ignore often come back to us in our sleep.

Wealth, beauty, and fame are transient. When those are gone, little is left except the need to be useful.

that strange conflict in the American character: we pride ourselves on being the melting pot of the world but we insist on regarding most immigrants with suspicion.

I was plunged into what was known as the debutante social whirl. This was one of the ways fathers justified their own hard work and sacrifices.

What a different world it was when I first sailed for Europe in 1930, with my mother, sister, and brother to spend six months abroad.

A flame burns brightest just before it goes out.

It is difficult to write about any form of mental disease, especially your own, without sounding as if you were examining a bug under glass.

Those who become mentally ill often have a history of chronic pain.

When you have spent an important part of your life playing Let's Pretend, it's often easy to see symbolism where none exists.

I learned quickly at Columbia that the only eye that mattered was the one on the camera.

Nothing strengthens a woman's determination to be in love quite so much as being told that she cannot.

Everyone should see Hollywood once, I think, through the eyes of a teenage girl who has just passed a screen test.

Joe Schenck, a top 20th Century-Fox executive, once said to me that he really believed I had a future, and that was because I was the only girl who could survive so many bad pictures.

I do not recall spending long hours in front of a mirror loving my reflection.

In later years, during what might be called my gray-outs — when I was conscious but not myself — I craved foods that were almost always fattening.

I approached everything, my job, my family, my romances, with intensity.

Houses are one of my passions. I probably should have been an interior decorator.

We cannot calculate the numbers of people who left, fled or were fished out of Europe just ahead of the Holocaust.

I knew I could not cope with the future unless I was able to rediscover the past.

I had been introduced to psychotherapy, in which the doctors let you talk, talk, talk, until you find the source of your problem or find another doctor.

Cars, furs, and gems were not my weaknesses.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

As an actress, I was trained to show emotion I did not feel, or no emotion at all.

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

I was fortunate enough to work under directors who were, most of them, brilliant, emotional men.

Eccentric behavior is not routinely noticed around a movie set.

I simply did not want my face to be my talent.

My departure from Hollywood was described as a walk-out. No one understood that I was cracking up.

I am not the kind of woman who excuses her mistakes while reminding us of what used to be.

My parents argued more than I remembered, about money and all the little things that disguise the truth that you are still arguing about money.

I had been offered a Hollywood contract before my 18th birthday. It gave me the spark I needed.

Where there is hope, there is no despair.

In show business the saying seems too often true: it isn't enough to succeed; someone else must fail.

Rehearsals and screening rooms are often unreliable because they can't provide the chemistry between an audience and what appears on the stage or screen.

The Howard Hughes I knew began to change after his plane crash in 1941.

I used to annoy my father by telling him how much I felt luck was with me.

Movie failures are like the common cold. You can stay in bed and take aspirin for six days and recover. Or you can walk around and ignore it for six days and recover.

I'm not sure I can explain the nature of Jack Kennedy's charm, but he took life just as it came.

I followed the same diet for 20 years, eliminating starches, living on salads, lean meat, and small portions.

Some women feel the best cure for a broken heart is a new beau.

I dated dozens of young men, had fun with all, made commitments to none.

In my early days in Hollywood I tried to be economical. I designed my own clothes, much to my mother's distress.