Alla Nazimova

“I don't live in the past, but I don't choose to forget it, either.”

“Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same.”

“There is a destiny that makes us brothers; none goes his way alone. All that we send into the lives of others comes back into our own.”

“To be a star is to own the world and all the people in it. After a taste of stardom, everything else is poverty.”

“The stage is a world of shadows, and the actor is the shadow of a shadow.”

“Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.”

“I am not a personality, I am a principle.”

“An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.”

“Why must we always be youthful? I have seen so many beautiful old women.”

“I created myself. I have taught myself everything I know.”

“Every day I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies in the love we have not given, the powers we have not used, the selfish prudence that will risk nothing and which, shirking pain, misses happiness as well.”

“The screen is a hungry monster, it devours your soul.”