Having cancer gave me membership in an elite club I’d rather not belong to.
Adopted kids are such a pain – you have to teach them how to look like you.
I grew up in front of a television. I guess I’ll grow old inside of one.
Comedy is very controlling – you are making people laugh.
I have always found men who were funny, irresistible. It’s rare that I ever based love on looks or superficial things, but it a guy made me laugh-and that didn’t mean he had to be in comedy professionally – I was hooked.
I would say that Lucy, ‘I Love Lucy,’ she was my idol.
Humor is just truth, only faster!
Fame changes a lot of things, but it can’t change a light bulb.
Show business is like riding a bicycle – when you fall off, the best thing to do is get up, brush yourself off and get back on again.
It’s always something.
I think clothes should make you feel safe. I like clothes you want to go to sleep in. I sometimes stand in front of a mirror and change a million times because I know I really want to wear my nightgown.
I’m not really an impersonator.
Some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end.
Never let a gynecologist put anything in your nose.
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.
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.
What we put into every moment is all we have.
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.
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.
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.