Auntie Mame Quotes

Life is a banquet and most poor s.o.b.'s are starving to death." Auntie Mame

Auntie Mame, who was the british lady?" 'Oh, she's from Pittsburgh' 'But she had the acc-' 'Well, when your from Pittsburgh you gotta do something

Not all gays respond to the same stuff. Would Alexander the Great have loved Auntie Mame?

Life is a banquet and most poor bastards are starving to death!

Oh, darling, you know we writers must occasionally stretch a point to heighten the dramatic situation.

Why darling, I'm your Auntie Mame!

Morning, I soon discovered, was one o’clock for Auntie Mame. Early Morning was eleven, and the Middle of the Night was nine.

If my mother was odd enough to crave a bubble bath at three in the morning, Dorothy was inventive enough to suggest adding broken glass to the tub. If my mother insisted on listening to West Side Story repeatedly, it was Dorothy who said, 'Let's listen to it on forty-five!' And when my mother announced that she wanted a fur wrap like Auntie Mame, Dorothy bought her an unstable Norwegian elkhound from a puppy mill.

she thought that 9Am was in the middle of the night

Life is a buffet...and most poor bastards are starving to death.

She made another sweeping gesture that somehow went wrong because she knocked over the coffee pot and I immediately wrote down six new words which Auntie Mame said to scratch out and forget.

I wish you wouldn’t use the term Christian where it is so obviously misapplied,” Auntie Mame said steadily.

Within the last two years it had been called Tony's, Belle's Bar Sinister, The Ole Plantation, Tony's, Alt Wien, Paris Soir--or Sewer--Victor's Vesuvius, Chez Cocotte, York House, Gay Madrid, and Tony's.

To Mame, conventional thinking and Early American décor are a prison; she advocates total sexual freedom, world travel, and “the feverish excitement of the creative career!” Mame believes that life must be art,

Women in movies from Hollywood's golden era dressed the way my mother did now. My entire childhood, she'd shown up at PTA meeting in bust-hugging sequins, the sight of which gave my father complicated facial twitches. She was flamboyant, really, in no other way. There was nothing Auntie Mame about her. Unless Auntie Mame had a penchant for public collapse.

My dear, a rich vocabulary is the true hallmark of every intellectual person. Here now”—she burrowed into the mess on her bedside table and brought forth another pad and pencil—“every time I say a word, or you hear a word, that you don’t understand, you write it down and I’ll tell you what it means. Then you memorize it and soon you’ll have a decent vocabulary. Oh, the adventure,” she cried ecstatically, “of molding a little new life!” She made another sweeping gesture that somehow went wrong because she knocked over the coffee pot and I immediately wrote down six new words which Auntie Mame said to scratch out and forget about.

She was built along the lines of a General Electric refrigerator and looked like a cross between Caligula and a cockatoo. Mother Burnside had beady little eyes, an imperious beak of a nose, sallow skin, and bad breath. She wore a stiff black wig and a stiff black dress and she sat all day long in a darkened drawing room, her pudgy hands - encrusted with dirty diamond rings - folded over her pudgy belly.

French martinis or lemon drops or cosmos and impromptu viewings of Auntie Mame (the Rosalind Russell version, not the Lucille Ball version) or Steel Magnolias.

Like most men who are supremely unattractive to women, Cousin Elmore was somehow able to find invitation in every insult, a caress in every blow, come-hither in every go-yonder and a yes in every no.

Auntie Mame sat decoratively on a Louis XIV love seat and discussed the heat, the humidity, how the climate was changing from year to year in New York,

Mame Dennis: That's a B. It's the first letter of a seven-letter word that means your father.

and they don’t have to know about a lot of things that ordinary mortals just don’t have to know about!

I giochi che si svolgono in silenzio sono quelli più pericolosi

...When my nephew was three, [his mother] was worrying about getting him into the right preschool. Kid's fifteen now. He's under pressure to make sure he gets good grades so he can get into a good school. He needs to show good extracurricular activities to get into a good school. He needs to be popular with his classmates. Which means be just like them. Dress right, use the proper slang, listen to proper music, go away on the proper vacations. Live in the right neighborhood, be sure his parents drive the right car, hang with the right group, have the right interests. He has homework. He has soccer practice and guitar lessons. The school decides what he has to learn, and when, and from whom. The school tells him which stairwell he can go up. It tells him how fast to move through the corridors, when he can talk, when he can't, when he can chew gum, when he can have lunch, what he is allowed to wear..." Rita paused and took a drink. "Boy", I said. "Ready for corporate life." She nodded. "And the rest of the world is telling him he's carefree," she said. "And all the time he's worried that the boys will think he's a sissy, and the school bully will beat him up, and the girls will think he's a geek." "Hard times," I said. "The hardest," she said. "And while he's going through puberty and struggling like hell to come to terms with the new person he's becoming, running through it all, like salt in a wound, is the self-satisfied adult smirk that keeps trivializing his angst." "They do learn to read and write and do numbers," I said. "They do. And they do that early. And after that, it's mostly bullshit. And nobody ever consults the kid about it." "You spend time with this kid," I said. "I do my Auntie Mame thing every few weeks. He takes the train in from his hideous suburb. We go to a museum, or shop, or walk around and look at the city. We have dinner. We talk. He spends the night, and I usually drive him back in the morning." "What do you tell him?" I said. "I tell him to hang on," Rita said. She was leaning a little forward now, each hand resting palm-down on the table, her drink growing warm with neglect. "I tell him that life in the hideous suburb is not all the life there is. I tell him it will get better in a few years. I tell him that he'll get out of that stultifying little claustrophobic coffin of a life, and the walls will fall away and he'll have room to move and choose, and if he's tough enough, to have a life of his own making." As she spoke, she was slapping the tabletop softly with her right hand. "If he doesn't explode first," she said. "Your jury summations must be riveting," I said. She laughed and sat back. "I love that kid," she said. "I think about it a lot." "He's lucky to have you. Lot of them have no one." Rita nodded. "Sometimes I want to take him and run," she said. The wind shifted outside, and the rain began to rattle against the big picture window next to us. It collected and ran down, distorting reality and blurring the headlights and taillights and traffic lights and colorful umbrellas and bright raincoats into a kind of Parisian shimmer. "I know," I said.