Annie Oakley Quotes

I ain't afraid to love a man. I ain't afraid to shoot him either.

Aim at a high mark and you'll hit it. No, not the first time, nor the second time. Maybe not the third. But keep on aiming and keep on shooting for only practice will make you perfect.

CJ added more beer to her mug. “If I recall correctly, the last verbal directive we were given was ‘don’t shoot anyone’ when we were in Hoganville. And I do believe I did not fire my weapon.” She glanced over at Paige. “But our dear, sweet Paige Riley turned into Annie Oakley.

After traveling through fourteen foreign countries and appearing before all the royalty and nobility I have only one wish today. That is that when my eyes are closed in death that they will bury me back in that quiet little farm land where I was born.

She was bold, and yet she was reserved. She was sensual and girlish, but she was never coy. So I think that what she projected was a vitality and freshness that for many people came to stand for American womanhood. It's what made American women attractive: that outdoor complexion, that wonderful figure, and yet that carriage, that demureness, that suggested that she was in charge of herself and not to be had.

I don't need a man. I have a gun.

If I wanted to shoot someone’s face, they’d know it.

He glanced around, his eyes widening a little when he looked toward her bedroom. She winced, but resisted the urge to jump and close the door. He was staring at the poster above her bed, an image of Annie Oakley with the quote "I ain't afraid to love a man. I ain't afraid to shoot him either.

Samantha imagined that in another life, she and Alison could have, indeed, been friends. Had she not been about to rob the train.

Alison’s gaze gentled. “Tell me, Samantha, have you ever been to Scotland?

Tis best to weight the enemy more mighty than he seems.” Or she, as was this particular case.

Ye’re wet,” he groaned. “I’m underwater.” “I ken that, bonny. But this dampness has nothing to do with that.

Fine. You’re Lucious Landrum and I’m Annie Oakley. Can I go now?

When a man hits a target, they call him a marksman. When I hit it, they call it a trick. Never did like that much. —Annie Oakley I figure, if a girl wants to be a legend, she should just go ahead and be one. —Calamity Jane

Show business imposes its own strict temporality: no matter how many CDs or DVDs we own, it would still have been better to have been there, to have seen the living performers in the richness of their being and to have participated, however briefly, in the glory of their performance.

When a man hits a target, they call him a marksman. When I hit a target, they call it a trick. Never did like that much.

Annie refused to believe in nightmares. Anything she feared at night, she knew she could kill once awake.

Nothing like gunpowder to get a girl going.

Who knew being married was such fun," he panted, pressing a kiss to her temple and swatting her backside simultaneously. She pulled back to look at him, one of her rare, reluctant smiles tugging at the corner of her kiss-reddened mouth. "You probably should have done it years ago." "Nay, lass," he said suddenly feeling very serious. "Then it wouldna have been ye.

Though her muscles went rigid, her tongue sparred with his, as he might have guessed it would. Each lick and swirl, each plunge and retreat became a point counted for or against. Gavin had never enjoyed a woman’s mouth so much in his entire life.

To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl Do you realize that if you had started building the Parthenon on the day you were born you would be all done in only one more year? Of course, you couldn’t have done it alone, so never mind, you’re fine just as you are. You are loved simply for being yourself. But did you know that at your age Judy Garland was pulling down $150,000 a picture, Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory, and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room? No wait, I mean he had invented the calculator. Of course, there will be time for all that later in your life after you come out of your room and begin to blossom, or at least pick up all your socks. For some reason, I keep remembering that Lady Jane Grey was Queen of England when she was only fifteen, but then she was beheaded, so never mind her as a role model. A few centuries later, when he was your age, Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies, four operas, and two complete Masses as a youngster. But of course that was in Austria at the height of romantic lyricism, not here in the suburbs of Cleveland. Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15 or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17? We think you are special by just being you, playing with your food and staring into space. By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes, but that doesn’t mean he never helped out around the house.

He was going to kiss her. The thought speared through her stunned mind as he closed the distance between them and brushed his warm lips over hers. The rush was like plunging from the high point of a roller coaster: sheer exhilaration, breathlessness, half a heart attack. She made a sound. She hadn't meant it to be encouraging, but it so obviously was, he kissed her deeper. Nobody kissed like Harper. God, she'd almost forgotten how he would begin slow and soft and seduce her mouth little by little until she was hopelessly lost, until she was ruthlessly conquered.

Stop what?” he asked. When she looked at him in confusion, he sat down on her sofa. “What do you need to stop?” Well, for starters, it would be great to quit thinking of you lying faceup on that rug right there and me riding you like Annie-frickin’-Oakley until your six-gun goes off in my— “Oh, God.” She went to cover the flush on her face with her hands—and ended up smacking herself with the plates and the napkins that she forgot she was holding. “Ow—okay, right. I gotta get a grip here.” “On what?” he asked. Don’t say it, she told her mouth. Don’t you dare answer that question.

… The frayed and gritty edges of everyone’s world were being worried away by neighbors you’d never noticed until the air spilled over with the tragedy of their loss. The war had taken them or their children; killed them, lost them, torn off body parts, shipped them back brain-fried…. … Tales fell from hearts in heavy, wet tones of grief and confusion…. … Even when rare moments of relative calm and clarity crept briefly through our days, they crawled in with head hanging through that most familiar of all tunnels, our sense of loss. Each new friend seemed only to step in and announce himself with his last breath. Why hadn’t we loved him earlier when there had been more time? That overriding sense of loss was the dismal cloud through which you viewed the world. Dreading life’s relentless advance, but knowing your locks could never keep it out…. … As the late 60’s gave in and died, and I trudged through my first year as an art student in college, even the old folks were growing up. Their World War II glories clouded over. Someone had shot the president, his brother, and a great civil rights leader, dragging us all out of our warm, snuggly innocence. People seemed infested by life, burdened by the stifling weight of it, until we could only force shallow, labored breaths. Each new day was just an old one playing through again, a dust-laden August, a storm always riding right on top of you that never quite cut loose. It settled into your joints until they grew achy, too heavy to lift; tarring all hearts with a dark, heavy plaque. Days stuck together as walking and breathing grew tedious. Until even my bubbly sister couldn’t offer up a smile without a shadow lurking inside it. We trudged through life as our mighty nation killed our sons and broke our buddies, defending itself from skinny barefoot farmers with sticks, in rice swamps somewhere on the other side of existence, where you couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad. Some lost tiny nowhere that hadn’t even existed when you’d been a kid; when the world had been innocent and untainted. Back when Father Knew Best, Beaver’s mom fed his dad all the answers, and Annie Oakley never had to shoot to kill…. - From “Entertaining Naked People

Sitting Bull gave most of the money away to the band of ragged, hungry boys who seemed to surround him wherever he went. He once told Annie Oakley, another one of the Wild West Show's stars, that he could not understand how white men could be so unmindful of their own poor. "The white man knows how to make everything," he said, "but he does not know how to distribute it.

In other words, Berlin conceived shows as events more than as works. As a result, Berlin’s shows do not exactly represent the most enduring oeuvre in the American theater: only Annie Get Your Gun, the show that least obviously addresses its time, has enjoyed an unbroken string of productions that stretches from its premiere to the present. Yet by engaging with the here-and-now, with no apparent thought of posterity but mainly of the “mob” before him, Berlin distilled and packaged musical comedy conventions that resonated in the theater deep into the twentieth century even as they held to comedy’s ancient ideals. Above all—and this I think manifests the engine that drives all of his work—Berlin seems to have understood and embraced the idea that American musical theater is always, inescapably, about itself. He probably would have scorned the term metatheater, but the boot fits. All of his stage shows and films are in some way about theater, about putting on a show, about performing in public, and about the place that tested his mettle and nourished his craft: New York City. This is the case even in shows that are not chiefly set in New York. Annie Get Your Gun may be widely considered one of the “Western” musicals of the Oklahoma! age, but it is above all a show about “show business,” and it all takes place east of (or near to) the Mississippi River and ends up in New York, with plenty of swinging tunes that resonate more with postwar Manhattan than with Annie Oakley’s earlier America in Darke County,

There are people who make a hobby of "alternative history," imagining how history would be different if small, chance events had gone another way One of my favorite examples is a story I first heard from the physicist Murray Gell-Mann. In the late 1800s, "Buffalo Bill" Cody created a show called Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, which toured the United States, putting on exhibitions of gun fighting, horsemanship, and other cowboy skills. One of the show's most popular acts was a woman named Phoebe Moses, nicknamed Annie Oakley. Annie was reputed to have been able to shoot the head off of a running quail by age twelve, and in Buffalo Bill's show, she put on a demonstration of marksmanship that included shooting flames off candles, and corks out of bottles. For her grand finale, Annie would announce that she would shoot the end off a lit cigarette held in a man's mouth, and ask for a brave volunteer from the audience. Since no one was ever courageous enough to come forward, Annie hid her husband, Frank, in the audience. He would "volunteer," and they would complete the trick together. In 1890, when the Wild West Show was touring Europe, a young crown prince (and later, kaiser), Wilhelm, was in the audience. When the grand finale came, much to Annie's surprise, the macho crown prince stood up and volunteered. The future German kaiser strode into the ring, placed the cigarette in his mouth, and stood ready. Annie, who had been up late the night before in the local beer garden, was unnerved by this unexpected development. She lined the cigarette up in her sights, squeezed...and hit it right on target. Many people have speculated that if at that moment, there had been a slight tremor in Annie's hand, then World War I might never have happened. If World War I had not happened, 8.5 million soldiers and 13 million civilian lives would have been saved. Furthermore, if Annie's hand had trembled and World War I had not happened, Hitler would not have risen from the ashes of a defeated Germany, and Lenin would not have overthrown a demoralized Russian government. The entire course of twentieth-century history might have been changed by the merest quiver of a hand at a critical moment. Yet, at the time, there was no way anyone could have known the momentous nature of the event.

Dick:

Please do not make me reach for my inner Annie Oakley because she often hangs out with my inner Calamity Jane.

That’s pretty much our story: Melanie and Scarlett, Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane, the soccer moms and the vampire slayers. All of them are more complicated than they let on.

But there were a few well-known real-life cowgirls, and the most famous by far were Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane. They were America’s first action heroines, amalgams of femininity and fighting spirit. Not since Hannah Dustan scalped her Indian captors in 1697 had the country been so enamored with the idea of a woman warrior.

This sounds like an incredible young woman.” “She is that. Very mild mannered—hard to guess she could have that kind of conviction. Stubbornness.” “Strength,” Aiden added. “Commitment.” “Well, you’d have to be strong to do that, right? Yeah, she’s very strong, but she seems fragile.” Then he grinned. “Unless you see her on a horse. She’s a hundred and ten pounds, and on a horse, she’s Annie Oakley.” Again

God intended women to be outside as well as men, and they do not know what they are missing when they stay cooped up in the house. —Annie Oakley (1860–1926), American sharpshooter and women’s rights advocate W

General Sherman praised the shows as "wonderfully realistic and historically reminiscent." Reviews and the show's own publicity always stressed its "realism." There is no doubt it was more realistic, visually and in essence, than any of the competing Wild Wests. There were four other Wild West shows that year: Adam Forepaugh had one, Dr. A. W. Carver another; there was a third called Fargo's Wild West and one known as Hennessey's Wild West. Cody criticized all their claims and their use of the words "Wild West." He had copyrighted the term according to an act of Congress on December 22, 1883, and registered a typescript at the Library of Congress on June 1, 1885. The copyright title read: The Wild West or Life among the Red Man and the Road Agents of the Plains and Prairies-An Equine Dramatic Exposition on Grass or Under Canvas, of the Adventures of Frontiersmen and Cowboys. Additional copy was headed BUFFALO BILL'S "WILD WEST" PRAIRIE EXHIBITION AND ROCKY MOUNTAIN SHOW, A DRAMATIC-EQUESTRIAN EXPOSITION OF LIFE ON THE PLAINS, WITH ACCOMPANYING MONOLOGUE AND INCIDENTAL MUSIC THE WHOLE INVENTED AND ARRANGED BY W.F. CODY W.F. CODY AND N. SALSBURY, PROPRIETORS AND MANAGERS WHO HEREBY CLAIM AS THEIR SPECIAL PROPERTY THE VARIOUS EFFECTS INTRODUCED IN THE PUBLIC PERFORMANCES OF BUFFALO BILL'S "WILD WEST" Although the show's first year under enlarged and reorganized management had not been a financial success, at least one good thing had come from it. Also showing in New Orleans that winter had been the Sells Brothers Circus. One of its performers who had wandered over to visit the Wild West lot was Annie Oakley. The story of Annie Oakley's life was so much in the American grain that it might have come from the pen of Horatio Alger Jr., the minister turned best-selling author, who chronicled the fictional lives of poor boys who made good. Ragged Dick: or, Street Life in New York, Ragged Tom, and Luck Moses then married Dan Brumbaugh, who died in an accident shortly afterward, leaving another daughter. When she was seven, Annie frequently fed the family with quail she had caught in homemade traps, much as young Will Cody had trapped small game. In an interview she once said: "I was eight years old when I made my first shot, and I still consider it one of the best shots I ever

It never settled her stomach to leave any kill behind.

I will always look for what my eyes cain’t see.

After spending years in an asylum, admitting what she knew out loud seemed terrifying and dangerous.

I hoped for one of my people to do this. But maybe if you can, it will bond you to the land and you’ll be able to rid the white man of his crimes.

BY 1876, THE YEAR THE Battle of the Little Bighorn was fought, the United States had become a nation of some forty million people, the vast majority of whom had never seen a fighting Indian—not, that is, unless they happened to glimpse one or another of the powerful Indian leaders whom the government periodically paraded through Washington or New York, usually Red Cloud, the powerful Sioux diplomat, who made a long-winded speech at Cooper Union in 1870. Or, it might be Spotted Tail, of the Brulé Sioux; or American Horse, or even, if they were lucky, Sitting Bull, who hated whites, the main exceptions being Annie Oakley, his “Little Sure Shot,” or Buffalo Bill Cody, who once described Sitting Bull as “peevish,” surely the understatement of the century. Sitting Bull often tried to marry Annie Oakley, who was married; he did not succeed.