Quotes About Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe has attracted many interpretations. Here's what a few people have had to say about Marilyn Monroe:
• About Marilyn Monroe, by her ex-husband, Arthur Miller: To have survived, she would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was. Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.
• Billy Wilder: The luminosity of that face! There has never been a woman with such voltage on the screen, with the exception of Garbo.
• Groucho Marx: It's amazing. She's Mae West, Theda Bara and Bo Peep all rolled into one.
• Shelley Winters: If she'd been dumber, she'd have been happier.
• Ronald Reagan, at a White House Briefing on tax reform, May 22, 1986: I must admit there were times in this process, as tax reform wended its way through the sometimes convoluted passageways of Congress, that even I had some momentary doubts. I told a group last night that it was a little like the time Marilyn Monroe, the late Marilyn Monroe, met Albert Einstein. And Marilyn grabbed him by the arm and said, "Let's get married." And Einstein looked at her and replied, "But, my dear, what if our children had my looks and your brains?"
• film critic Pauline Kael: Her mixture of wide-eyed wonder and cuddly drugged sexiness seemed to get to just about every male; she turned on even homosexual men. And women couldn't take her seriously enough to be indignant; she was funny and impulsive in a way that made people feel protective. She was a little knocked out; her face looked as if, when nobody was paying attention to her, it would go utterly slack -- as if she died between wolf calls.
• biographer Louis Banner: She is the child in all of us, the child we want to forget but can't dismiss. We want to know what would have happened to her if she had lived longer.
• From the eulogy by Lee Strasberg: She had a luminous quality -- a combination of wistfulness, radiance, yearning, that set her apart and yet made everyone wish to be part of it, to share in the childlike naïvete which was at once so shy and yet so vibrant.
• Also from Lee Strasberg's eulogy: Marilyn Monroe was a legend. In her lifetime she created a myth of what a poor girl from a deprived background could attain. For the entire world she became a symbol of the eternal feminine.
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About These Quotes
Quote collection assembled by Jone Johnson Lewis. Each quotation page in this collection and the entire collection © Jone Johnson Lewis 1997-2011. This is an informal collection assembled over many years. I regret that I am not be able to provide the original source if it is not listed with the quote.
Citation information:
Jone Johnson Lewis. "Quotes About Marilyn Monroe." About Women's History. URL: http://womenshistory.about.com/cs/quotes/marilyn_monroe.htm . Date accessed: (today). (More on how to cite online sources including this page)
