Cripple Quotes

When a makeup is as painful as that which I wore as Blizzard in The Penalty (1920/I), when I had my legs strapped up and couldn`t bear it that way more than 20 minutes at a time - when I have to be a cripple, as in The Miracle Man (1919) or have to keep a certain attitude of body, as I did in Shadows (1922/I), it sometimes takes a good deal of imagination to forget your physical sufferings. Yet, at that, the subconscious mind has a marvelous way of making you keep the right attitudes and make the right gestures when you are actually acting.

(on James Dean) Dean`s body was very graphic; it was almost writhing in pain sometimes. He was very twisted, as if he were cringing all the time. Dean was a cripple anyway, inside -- he was not like (Marlon Brando). People compared them, but there was no similarity. He was a far, far sicker kid and Brando`s not sick, he`s just troubled.

(About Elizabeth Taylor): "Elizabeth has great worries about becoming a cripple because her feet sometimes have no feeling in them. She asked if I would stop loving her if she had to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. I told her that I didn`t care if her legs, bum and bosoms fell off and her teeth turned yellow. And she went bald. I love that woman so much sometimes that I cannot believe my luck. She has given me so much."

(About Elizabeth Taylor): "Elizabeth has great worries about becoming a cripple because her feet sometimes have no feeling in them. She asked if I would stop loving her if she had to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. I told her that I didn`t care if her legs, bum and bosoms fell off and her teeth turned yellow. And she went bald. I love that woman so much sometimes that I cannot believe my luck. She has given me so much."

Pity? You don`t want to be pitied because you`re a cripple in a wheelchair? Stay in your house!

I recently saw the movie about Ray Charles, and there`s a scene where he falls down and the mother doesn`t help him. She says, I don`t want anyone to treat you like a cripple. I`ve fallen down before, and Molly will say, get up and just go.

I`d get more applause than some because I was just seventeen. If they didn`t clap at the end of my act I would limp off stage and boy would they feel guilty. They would all burst into tremendous applause as they saw this poor cripple kid walking off.

Sex is full of lies. The body tries to tell the truth. But, it`s usually too battered with rules to be heard, and bound with pretenses so it can hardly move. We cripple ourselves with lies.

The divide of race has been America`s constant curse. Each new wave of immigrants gives new targets to old prejudices. Prejudice and contempt, cloaked in the pretense of religious or political conviction, are no different. They have nearly destroyed us in the past. They plague us still. They fuel the fanaticism of terror. They torment the lives of millions in fractured nations around the world. These obsessions cripple both those who are hated and, of course, those who hate, robbing both of what they might become.