Norma Quotes

I didn't want to spend the rest of my life playing Norma Desmond over and over again. (Gloria Swanson)

What he dreads is that, during a lull in the conversation, someone will come up with what he calls The Question-"What led you, Mrs. Costello, to become a vegetarian?”-and that she will then get on her high horse and produce what he and Norma call The Plutarch Response. ... The response in question comes from Plutarch's moral essays. His mother has it by heart; he can reproduce it only imperfectly. "You ask me why I refuse to eat flesh. I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, am astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death-wounds.” Plutarch is a real conversation-stopper: it is the word juices that does it. Producing Plutarch is like throwing down a gauntlet; after that, there is no knowing what will happen.

J. M. Coetzee

Right now I'm just thinking about school and trying to get those grades and keep them up! In case I become a Norma Desmond when I grow up, I can have something to fall back on!

Anna Chlumsky

I haven't watched anything I've been in since I've done it. I have never put in a movie at home that I've been in. Why? I don't know. I would feel like Norma Desmond. And I have a kid, so time is at a premium.

Helen Hunt

I hold that the beginning of modern Irish drama was in the winter of 1898, at a school feast at Coole, when Douglas Hyde and Miss Norma Borthwick acted in Irish in a Punch and Judy show; and the delighted children went back to tell their parents what grand curses 'An Craoibhin' had put on the baby and the policeman.

Lady Gregory

I see now that when Norma flowered in our garden I became a weed, allowed to exist only where I would not be seen, in corners and dark places.

Daniel Keyes

I wrote a novel called "Blonde," which is about Norma Jean Baker, who becomes Marilyn Monroe, which I called a fictitious biography. That uses the material as if it were myth - that Marilyn Monroe is like this mythical figure in our culture.

Joyce Carol Oates

So they were turning, after all those cameras. Life, which can be strangely merciful, had taken pity on Norma Desmond. The dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her. Norma You see, this is my life. It always will be (In a whisper) There's nothing else just us and the cameras and those wonderful people out there in the dark. All right, Mr. De Mille, I'm ready for my close-up.

Gloria Swanson

I never wanted to be Marilyn - it just happened. Marilyn's like a veil I wear over Norma Jeane.

Marilyn Monroe

I didn't pay much attention to the whistles and whoops, in fact, I didn't quite hear them. I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jeane from the orphanage who belonged to nobody the other was someone whose name I didn't know. But I knew where she belonged she belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world.

Marilyn Monroe

In all her recordings, one witnesses this incredible technique at work, whether it is Puritani, Sonnambula, Lucia, Norma or Abduction, [or] turning around to sing Gioconda and Kundry. This ability to devour all of vocal music history, and take it into herself and spew out such excellent examples of all these different styles - you just think, "How is a voice able to encompass all of this?” Well, it's not the voice, it's the woman behind the voice. (Maria Callas)

[Hearing Callas in Norma in 1952] was a shock, a wonderful shock. You just got shivers up and down the spine. It was a bigger sound in those earlier performances, before she lost weight. I think she tried very hard to recreate the sort of "fatness” of the sound which she had when she was as fat as she was. But when she lost the weight, she couldn't seem to sustain the great sound that she had made, and the body seemed to be too frail to support that sound that she was making. Oh, but it was oh so exciting. It was thrilling. I don't think that anyone who heard Callas after 1955 really heard the Callas voice.

Maria Callas