Diana Ross Quotes

Lanie, you live 15 minutes away from your office and you get there at eight. Over two hours every day just to do your hair and makeup. Diana fuckin' Ross in her heyday probably took less time to get ready for a show. Babe, if that isn't high maintenance, I do not know what is.

I can be a better me than anyone can.

He is not my focus," Diana told writer Rodney Tyler of Arne. "He’s my husband, my companion, my lover, my confidant. But not my focus. I wasn’t lost, then found by Arne. I was single and met a wonderful man and we enjoyed each other’s company and enjoyed our times together. So it was not lost and found. That’s crap. I have never been lost.

Don't call the doctor, don't call ya mamma, don't call the preacher; no, I don't need it.

I remember hearing Diana Ross once say, “Know who you are because if you don’t, they will make you what they want.

The farmers, who rent out their house so they can stay afloat, and sleep all together in a studio, but spend their days off outside on a picnic blanket, living the lives they want to live. Drew and Melanie, with their two homes and their horses and their love story. And Rene, traveling across the world, painting temporary masterpieces. Even my uncle Pete has something good worked out with Melinda and his day trips and his best friend, my dad, who has a small nice house in San Francisco and a dozen neighborhood vendors who know him by name. All of these different ways of living. Even Sophie, with her baby in that apartment, with her record store job and her record collection. I imagine her twirling with her baby across her red carpet with Diana Ross crooning, the baby laughing, the two of them getting older in that apartment, eating meals on red vinyl chairs. Walt, too, as pathetic as his situation is, seems happy in his basement, providing entertainment to Fort Bragg's inner circle. All of them, in their own ways, manage to make their lives work.

The greatest gift that my kids give me is the reminder that I'm not so great. I'm just ordinary.

It represented a world I didn’t know, the opposite of where I was—and I hated where I was. I hated the poverty, the cigarette smoke, the drug use, the embarrassment, the loneliness. And Diana Ross was promising me that there was a world that wasn’t stained with sadness and resignation. Somewhere there was a world that was sensual and robotic and hypnotic. And clean.

Despite my having grown up in the south, Portland is the most racist place I have ever lived. This is because being anti-racist isn't about using politically correct buzzwords and giving lip-service to sensitive conservation topics. Being anti-racist is about constructing a landscape that is safe for dark people to inhabit. It is not about white people trying to prove they are "woke" by putting up yard signs. That is not even what "woke" means. "Woke" is a territory of open-eyed, unsuperficial, cultural awareness white people are nowhere close to occupying; they are not even in the neighborhood. But being anti-racist in this dangerous era is something they can do, by going out of their way to make non-white people feel safe.

Friday, August 9 Nixon resigns. A 1-1 draw with Swindon Town on our way home concludes the tour of the West Country.

bent forward, hugging his knees. ‘Then I could see, too. The English, wriggling over the ground like maggots in meat, and the men behind me. George McClure came up with me, and Wallace and Ross on the other side, and we were walkin’ still, one pace at a time, but faster and faster, seein’ the sassenaches breaking before us.’ There was a dull boom off to the right;

The entire incident might have been avoided had Willis more carefully selected the tracks in his blaring music playlist. “Sometimes it’s Diana Ross, which is good,” a neighbor later told the Los Angeles Times, “and sometimes it’s his album, which is bad.

I began my research by taking Diana Ross to lunch. She said she couldn’t help me; she barely knew Michael. The story about her discovering the Jackson 5 was made up, as was the idea that she had mothered him at Motown.

Through the mirror of my mind Time after time, I see reflections of you and me Reflections of the way life used to be Reflections of the love you took from me

I can be a better me than anyone can; I am me. Good or bad. I am myself. I'm no carbon copy of no one else.

Most people don’t understand performers are really sheltered and protected so much sometimes that they don’t get a chance to live their lives.

The names Americans visit on their children never ceases to amaze me. One of Diana Ross' daughters labours under the name of Chudney.

Not long after that, the questions came: Why you? Drag had been around forever. Why had I been able to crack the code after so many false starts and almosts? But I knew they would never understand the delicate choreography I’d done to make it all work. I’d mastered the art of naughty-lite: two spoonfuls of Diana Ross, a pinch of Cher, a shake of Dolly Parton, all sealed with Walt Disney’s family-friendliness. Before, I had been blurry—confusing, a thing that only some people could understand. Finally, I had snapped into focus, just in time for the whole world to see. The eighties, with all its excess and opulence, had also been marred by darkness: the heaviness of crack cocaine, the AIDS epidemic, the crashes of S&Ls in the markets. There was a yearning for levity in the culture, the very same irreverence and sense of play that had animated me my whole life. A window opened. I stepped through it.

It reminds me of how often we educated, higher-class black people change the tone in our voices, like we’re getting ready to sing an old Negro spiritual anytime we quote from “Ain’t I a Woman.” Sojourner Truth never said “Ain’t I a Woman.” She said, “I am a woman’s rights.” The phrase that elucidates how Truth saw herself—an enslaved black woman—as central to any conversation America can have about the law. She did not need to be rich or privileged to do this. She did not ask anyone if she was human enough to be of consideration. Truth’s speech, which was published in the Anti-Slavery Bugle weeks after her extemporaneous delivery, was “translated” by a white female abolitionist twelve years later to sound like minstrel black English. The transcription from the Bugle looks nothing like “Ain’t I a Woman.” Truth’s speech was originally delivered, and printed, in scholarly American English. Yet, here we are, Truth inscribed in even our memories as some white person’s version of her. I think

I was always lucky, and I knew it.

I sing because I'm happy, I sing because I'm free. His eye is on the sparrow And I know He watches me

I Feel for You,” Chaka Khan “She’s a Bad Mama Jama,” Carl Carlton “Ring My Bell,” Anita Ward “More Bounce to the Ounce,” Zapp “Le Freak,” CHIC “Best of My Love,” The Emotions “You Dropped a Bomb on Me,” The Gap Band “Forget Me Nots,” Patrice Rushen “I’m Coming Out,” Diana Ross “Let’s Groove,” Earth, Wind & Fire “Xanadu,” Olivia Newton-John “Night Fever,” Bee Gees “Love Rollercoaster,” Ohio Players “Get Down on It,” Kool & The Gang

I had a responsibility to hold whiteness above even myself. This made me a white supremacist; it took me an entire childhood of racist discrimination to learn anything different.

At that very moment I fell in love with fashion. Aunt Eileen had become Diana Ross right before our very eyes.

I have to tell you one thing about Diana Ross—I say it in her defense all the time—when she was poor, living in the projects, she was just as snotty as she is now, so her fame didn’t make her snotty.