Gilda Radner Quotes

Force is the right word to use for Belushi. Everything he did was suicidal — the way he ate, the way he drank, even the way he walked and moved. He would throw himself up in the air and splash down on the ground. His characters were suicidal. He was the master of kamikaze comedy. When he died, it didn’t seem so strange. But I knew I didn’t want to be the second one to go.

There is no real security except for whatever you build inside yourself.

Suddenly I began to wonder how to please so many people. do I take the magnesium citrate? What about the coffee enema? Do I do both? Do I do the abdominal message or the colonic? Do I tell the doctors about each other? East meets West in Gilda's body: Western medicine down my throat, Eastern medicine up my butt.

There are no guarantees. There are no promises, but there is you, and strength inside to fight for recovery. And always there is hope.

Never let a gynecologist put anything in your nose.

I base most of my fashion taste on what doesn't itch.

I can always be distracted by love, but eventually I get horny for my creativity.

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end.

Don’t look for perfect endings, but allow not knowing to lead you to a deeper appreciation of life, so that you get your joy back on the way to an outcome that remains to be revealed.

It's always something.

I had been pregnant in the sixties, and at nineteen years old had had an illegal abortion that probably influenced the messy state of my reproductive organs. For the next nineteen years my priority was to finish my education and pursue my career. Now I couldn’t take my fate: You’ll never have a baby. That was the sentence handed to me. I began to beat my fists against a door that maybe I had locked on the other side.

There are no guarantees. There are no promises, but there is you, and strength inside to fight for recovery. And always there is hope.

Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Like my life, this book has ambiguity. Like my life, this book is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity, as Joanna said.

Gilda’s book ends with her acceptance of what I had called, in working with her, “delicious ambiguity,” the freedom that comes with simply not knowing the outcome of every happening or happenstance.