missavagardner:

“You can trust that little screwball with your life or your hopes or your weaknesses, and she wouldn’t even know how to think about letting you down. She’s more fun than anybody, but she’ll take a poke at you if you have it coming and make you like it. If that adds up to love, then I love her.” - Clark Gable

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He was by his whole style and nature so much the most deeply “silent” of the silent comedians that even a smile was as deafeningly out of key as a yell. In a way his pictures are like a transcendent juggling act in which it seems that the whole universe is in exquisite flying motion and the one point of repose is the juggler’s effortless, uninterested face. — James Agee, September 1949

deforest:

No other comedian could do as much with the dead-pan. He used this great, sad, motionless face to suggest various related things; a one track mind near the track’s end of pure insanity; mulish imperturbability under the wildest of circumstances; how dead a human being can get and still be alive; an awe-inspiring sort of patience and power to endure, proper to granite but uncanny in flesh and blood. — James Agee in LIFE magazine

The screen was just a white sheet. They had this flickering machine. That was the first time I saw this angel with a white face and these beautiful eyes. I knew this was something special. It was the first time I saw him. He wore a flat pancake of a hat, and I just couldn’t believe the man’s grace. — Mel Brooks

The older Keaton got, the more one could see eternity in his look. —  Robert Benayoun

Buster Keaton … will be around forever, because it’s unlikely that human beings will ever go out-of-date the way special effects do. Keaton running and clambering onto a moving Civil War train in The General is infinitely more exciting than Christian Slater jumping from a helicopter onto a speeding locomotive in Broken Arrow because what Keaton does is real, and the camera captures and preserves his feats for posterity. In Broken Arrow we never see Slater (or the stuntman, for that matter) leaping from the helicopter to the train. Instead there are several cuts, and we must suspend our disbelief and assume that the feat has been accomplished. Which means that it’s no feat at all. — Anthony Puccinelli

Happy Birthday to the greatest, most innovative, and most genius figure in all of film. Today, we tip our pork pies to you. | Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton (4 Oct. 1895 - 1 Feb. 1966)

deforest:

during a transmission of The Phil Baker Show, 1938.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer. Old Newsman Writes: A Letter from Cuba, 1934

missavagardner:

Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko aka Natalie Wood

July 20, 1938 | November 29, 1981

“She was everything I was not. I was curvy, she was so tiny, like a bird. She was confident and I was so shy. She was the big star, I was the kid sister. But we loved each other so much. Nothing bad ever happened to Natalie. We would joke she was born under a lucky star.” - Lana Wood

thebeautiful-exchange:

“No one is born hating another person because of the colour of their skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

- Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 1994

Happy Birthday, Nelson Mandela!

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afro-art-chick:

Nelson Mandela. by ~stormo

“I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.”

“Lead from the back — and let others believe they are in front.”

“I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say. Part of being optimistic is keeping one’s head pointed toward the sun, one’s feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death.”

“I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can only rest for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended.”

“As I have said, the first thing is to be honest with yourself. You can never have an impact on society if you have not changed yourself… Great peacemakers are all people of integrity, of honesty, but humility.”

“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

- Happy 93rd Birthday to anti-apartheid political activist, former South African president & one of the greatest moral and political leaders of our time; Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

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hoodoothatvoodoo:

Anjelica Huston 1976

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missavagardner:

Frances Ethel Gumm aka Judy Garland | June 10, 1922 – June 22, 1969

“In the silence of night I have often wished for just a few words of love from one man, rather than the applause of thousands of people.”

Happy Birthday Judy!

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He is a truly complex fellow, not unlike the Michelangelos and da Vincis of the Renaissance period. He’s a supreme artist but he is constantly filled with doubts and self-anger about his work—and that is what makes him so good. He is a perfectionist who is never sure he is attaining perfection. — Rouben Mamoulian

There never was a greater perfectionist, there never was, and never will be, a better dancer, and I never knew anybody more kind, more considerate, or more completely a gentleman. I love Fred, and I admire and respect him. I guess it’s because he’s so many things I’d like to be and I’m not. — Bing Crosby, in a letter to John O’ Hara

Here I am twenty-four years old and what have I done, what am I doing, or what am I in the way of doing?  Nothing. When I think of these things it makes me so restless that I can hardly keep quiet. I feel myself already thirty or forty years old with nothing accomplished, and I feel a feverish desire to do something at once. Many men have made themselves world known by looking forward, seeing something sure to be of importance in the future, making the subject thoroughly their own, and stepping forward as the chief or only authority on the subject. Among the many striving for fame and fortune or both, I feel myself overmastered by a restless desire to do something.

18. Robert E. Peary, American explorer known to have been the first person to reach the georgraphic North Pole | Born 6 May 1856 – 20 February 1920