Sally Field Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Sally Field. Here they are! All 60 of them:

You have to give up the life you planned to find the life that's waiting for you
Sally Field
It took me a long time not to judge myself through someone else's eyes.
Sally Field
Carl Jung wrote, “Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
All of them with wounds that wouldn’t heal because no one acknowledged they were bleeding, and yet each of them needing the other to be near. And that—I realize—is how this story fits into my life. These generations of women, weaving a pattern into a lifelong garment, unconsciously handed down from mother to daughter to granddaughter to me.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
How can you change who you are and learn what it takes to get up, over and over, if you can’t allow yourself to feel how much it hurts to be knocked down?
Sally Field (In Pieces)
What I do know is this: How you care for your child from the time they are born until they’re eighteen is important, but who you are as a person and parent for as long as you live also counts, and counts one hell of a lot.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. —Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
Sally Field (In Pieces)
Why it moves so fast now when it used to move so painfully slow. It has to do with the percentage of your life that each day represents. When you’ve lived 25,915 days, one twenty-four-hour span is a very small part of the whole picture. But when you’ve only got 10,220 days under your belt, each day is a bigger portion of that existence.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
(Dominic after winning King & Queen contest at Prom along with Tess) “You like me, you really like me!” he said in a mock high-pitched voice, channeling his inner Sally Fields. “First of all, I have to thank my first grade teacher, what was her name? Mrs. Johnson? Nichols? Jameson? Prescott? Yeah, that was it. Man, I had such a crush on her. Even at five, I had awesome taste in women—just look at Tess. Isn’t she banging? Anyway, I need to thank Mrs. Pentecostal, because she told me I’d never win anything, and that hurt, man. But I guess I showed her. So take that, Mrs. Presley!
J.M. Darhower (Sempre (Sempre, #1))
I drove back in the pouring rain, blurry and dazed buy knowing I had a father who cared enough to make sure my stools were soft. What the hell, it was better than nothing.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
He never liked me. So I never liked him. A long time ago I made a decision that made things a lot simpler for me: I wasn't going to like someone who didn't like me. If someone had a problem with me, I wouldn't argue with him or try to change his mind. If he demonstrated he didn't like me, I came to the conclusion that life was too short, so fuck him. This included quite a few people I ran across in the music business, as well as my own brother and the whole nation of France. I wasn't going to turn into Sally Field ("You like me! You really like me!"), but I wasn't going to waste my time with assholes, either.
Jerry Heller (Ruthless: A Memoir)
You were magical.” I whispered back, “I was?” Then everything was dark again and I could barely see her at all. “What does that mean?” I asked. “Just that.” Another flash of headlights lit up the front seat and I could see her mouth edging toward a smile, the light bleaching her beautiful face white, then slowly fading to black.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
You got to get out into the field. Secondhand information in this world only takes you so far.
Sally J. Pla
All of them with wounds that wouldn’t heal because no one acknowledged they were bleeding, and yet each of them needing the other to be near.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
Furious for every moment in my life that I’d felt dismissed,
Sally Field (In Pieces)
I had found someone to love, to pour my heart into, someone I felt frightened of, and I was seeking to be loved the only way I knew how: by disappearing.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
On dry days, Bobbi and I walked along underused paths, kicking leaves and talking about things like the idea of landscape painting. Bobbi thought the fetishization of untouched nature was intrinsically patriarchal and nationalistic. "I like like houses better than fields," I observed. "They're more poetic, because they have people in them.
Sally Rooney (Conversations with Friends)
As I look back right now, I realize that it was all of those mindless, repetitive tasks I was forced to endure day after day, the getting up and doing every scene the best I could, over and over, that gave me a kind of “miles in the saddle.” They strengthened muscles not located in my body but in my heart—muscles not easy to access and certainly not fun. But easy is overrated and fun is extremely relative.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
Language was war, vaster than any host of swords, spears and sorcery. The self waging battle against everyone else. Borders enacted, defended, sallies and breaches, fields of corpses rotting like tumbled fruit. Words ever seeking allies, ever seeking iconic verisimilitude in the heaving press.
Steven Erikson (Midnight Tides (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #5))
I understand that some people prefer the third person plural for a pronoun,’ he replied, having recently interviewed a pop singer on his show who’d insisted upon this, leading one of the cameramen to be fired for calling them Sibyl, after the Sally Field movie about the woman with multiple personalities.
John Boyne (The Echo Chamber)
I like houses better than fields, I observed. They're more poetic, because they have people in them.
Sally Rooney (Conversations with Friends)
Do you need the ones you love to let you go before you can leave?
Sally Field (In Pieces)
you can leave?
Sally Field (In Pieces)
to be excellent at anything, it must cost you something.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
The problem can’t be my mother’s fault because I can’t live without her, so it must be mine. My mother is already perfect, she has to be, and I am not. I can fix me. I can make myself better.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
Oh my,” I looked up into the face of Cary Grant. All I could say was “Oh God.” Without missing a beat, he said, “Oh God is right,” then gestured toward my bulging midsection, adding, “Does he know about this, Sister?
Sally Field (In Pieces)
Certain moments in the creative process, moments when I am really seeing, are weirdly expansive, and I develop a hyper-attuned visual awareness, like the aura-ringed optical field before a migraine. Radiance coalesces about the landscape, rich in possibility, supercharged with something electric, insistent. Time slows down, becomes ecstatic.
Sally Mann (Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs)
A child instinctually knows that it cannot survive alone,” he told me a few days later, and I wanted to say, No shit. He continued, with a “be patient” look on his face, “But if their survival is dependent on someone who might be dangerous or deeply flawed, then the knowledge of that is too terrifying to accept, so the child creates a better scenario.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
There are certain things that you have to be British, or at least older than me, or possibly both, to appreciate: skiffle music, salt-cellars with a single hole, Marmite (an edible yeast extract with the visual properties of an industrial lubricant), Gracie Fields singing “Sally,” George Formby doing anything, jumble sales, making sandwiches from bread you’ve sliced yourself, really milky tea, boiled cabbage, the belief that household wiring is an interesting topic for conversation, steam trains, toast made under a gas grill, thinking that going to choose wallpaper with your mate constitutes a reasonably fun day out, wine made out of something other than grapes, unheated bedrooms and bathrooms, erecting windbreaks on a beach (why, pray, are you there if you need a windbreak?), and cricket. There may be one or two others that don’t occur to me at the moment.
Bill Bryson (Notes from a Small Island)
Most important, my mother was also given the chance to study acting with the brilliant Charles Laughton, eventually becoming a member of his acting company, the Charles Laughton Players, performing Chekhov and Shakespeare in a small theater on Beverly Boulevard, on the outskirts of Hollywood. Not only did she find herself onstage with Mr. Laughton, but she had the amazing good fortune to be directed by him as well. These moments stayed alive in her always.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
The Brook Alfred Tennyson By Alfred Tennyson more Alfred Tennyson I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley. By thirty hills I hurry down, Or slip between the ridges, By twenty thorpes, a little town, And half a hundred bridges. Till last by Philip's farm I flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever. I chatter over stony ways, In little sharps and trebles, I bubble into eddying bays, I babble on the pebbles. With many a curve my banks I fret By many a field and fallow, And many a fairy foreland set With willow-weed and mallow. I chatter, chatter, as I flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever. I wind about, and in and out, With here a blossom sailing, And here and there a lusty trout, And here and there a grayling, And here and there a foamy flake Upon me, as I travel With many a silvery waterbreak Above the golden gravel, And draw them all along, and flow To join the brimming river For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever. I steal by lawns and grassy plots, I slide by hazel covers; I move the sweet forget-me-nots That grow for happy lovers. I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance, Among my skimming swallows; I make the netted sunbeam dance Against my sandy shallows. I murmur under moon and stars In brambly wildernesses; I linger by my shingly bars; I loiter round my cresses; And out again I curve and flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever.
Alfred Tennyson
was lost and the other fortress was likewise lost. These two forts were besieged by seventy-five thousand Turkish regulars and more than four hundred thousand Moors and Arabs from all parts of Africa and, accompanying this vast force, was an abundance of munitions and engines of war and so many sappers that, with their bare hands, they could have covered the Goleta and the half-built fortress with just a handful of earth each. The Goleta, until then accounted to be impregnable, was the first to be lost, and it was not taken through any default of valor of its defenders who, in its defense did all they could do or ought to have done, but because experience had shown with what ease entrenchments might be dug in that desert sand. Though water had, at one time, been found sixteen inches below the surface, the Turks did not find any at a depth of two yards. And, therefore, filling many sacks full of sand, they raised their earthworks so high that they did surmount the walls of the fort and, thus, they could fire at the defenders from a superior height, so that it was impossible to mount a defense. “It was the general opinion that our troops should not have shut themselves up inside the Goleta, but should have waited in the open field to meet the adversary at the place of their disembarkation. But those who say this speak from a comfortable remove and with little experience in matters of this kind. For, if in the Goleta and the other fort there were scarce seven thousand soldiers, how could so few in number, be they ever so resolute, have sallied forth into the field and, at the same time, remained inside the fortifications against so great a number of enemies? And how is it possible not to lose a fort when it is not reinforced and resupplied, especially when it is besieged by so many determined enemies fighting on their own soil? But many were of the opinion, and so it seemed to me as well, that Heaven granted Spain a special favor by permitting the destruction of that source of iniquity, that monster of insatiable appetite, that devourer of innumerable sums of money spent there unprofitably without serving any end, other than to preserve the memory of its capture by the invincible Charles V, as if those stones of the Goleta were necessary to sustain his eternal fame, as it is and forever shall be. “The other fort was also lost, but the Turks were constrained to win it inch by inch, for the soldiers who defended it fought so manfully and so resolutely that they killed more than five and twenty thousand of the enemy over the course of two and twenty general assaults. Of the three hundred of our men who were taken prisoner, not one was left without a wound, a clear and manifest sign of their valor and strength,
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)
Luke watched from his bedchamber window as the would-be-gothic, all-too-comic hunting party sallied forth. Footmen bearing torches flanked the four adventurers: Intrepid Denny in the lead; the dark-haired Portia and slender Brooke a few paces behind, squabbling as they went. Cecily, with her flaxen hair and dove-gray cloak, bringing up the rear— graceful, pensive, lovely. She’d always worn melancholy well. She was rather like the moon that way: a fixture of bright, alluring sadness that kept watch with him each night. No, she had not changed. Not for him. He watched as the “hunters” crested a small rise at the edge of the green. On the downslope, Cecily made a brisk surge forward and took Denny’s arm. Then together they disappeared, the green-black shadows of the forest swallowing them whole. Luke felt no desire to chase after them. He’d had his fill of tramping through cold, moonlit forests— forests, and mountain ranges, and picked-clean orchards and endless fallow fields. He was weary of marching, and bone-tired of battle. Yet if he wanted Cecily, it seemed he must muster the strength to fight once more. -Luke's thoughts
Tessa Dare (The Legend of the Werestag)
You know all about my Sally Field crush," he said. "I'm not apologizing for it now." She'd forgotten about Neal's Sally Field crush. "I know all your dirty Gidget secrets," she said "It was the Flying Nun who really did it for me.
Rainbow Rowell
Suppose a soft glow appears behind your eyes. Very gently you bring your attention to the light. You don’t try to hold it or cling to it to make it stay. You just softly move your attention close to it. (Often, the best way to do this is not to observe it frontally, but as if you were watching it from the side.) Perhaps you gently breathe into it and let the breath merge your awareness into it. Or you explore it. How does it look? What is its texture? What do you see or hear? You might also try shifting your perspective. Instead of feeling that you are outside this vision, observing it, imagine that you are inside it. With a sound, imagine that you are hearing it all around you. Letting yourself be with an experience allows you to move much deeper into your inner field. Perhaps there is a sensation of expanding awareness, but the expansion stops at a certain point. You can let yourself linger on the edge of that expanded awareness, sensing the subtle texture of the consciousness that is expanding, or you can enter the field of consciousness that stretches within you, unfurling itself to the inner senses. The way to enter it is to become it. It’s not your physical self that becomes the expanded awareness, of course. It’s your mind-sense, your subtle self. You become it by identifying yourself with it. First, you identify yourself as awareness, as attention. (For some people, this may mean quickly going through a process in which you disengage from identifying with your body, perhaps thinking, “I am not my skin, my bones, my blood, or my organs. I am not my senses, my breath, my mind, or my thoughts. I am not my emotions or my sensations. I am Awareness. I am energy.”) Then you move as awareness into this subtle field within yourself, as if you were a snowball picking up more snow as you roll.
Sally Kempton (Meditation for the Love of It: Enjoying Your Own Deepest Experience)
Unionisation, of course, obstructs the extent to which employers are able to squeeze working people in their profit calculations, levelling the playing field between the single, powerful employer and the unified might of an organised workforce.
Sally McManus (On Fairness)
After her husband died, she went away to live with her eldest son, and the round house shared the fate of Sally's. Where it stood is now a ploughed field. The husband's sacrifices, the wife's romance, are as though they had never been - 'melted into air, into thin air.
Flora Thompson (Lark Rise (Essential Penguin))
The history of Courcelles is one well known within the annals of chivalry. Across these fields the Merovingian kings fought their battles. From this castle did the Lord of Courcelles sally forth on Crusade with his retinue of knights. And it was here, as legend has it, that the Demoiselle of Courcelles, the first of that name, Lady Melisande, brought the blessed Dame of Orleans, none other than Jeanne d’Arc, and besought her lord to follow the saint into battle for the glory of France.
Lauren Willig (Band of Sisters)
Reconstructing family life amid the chaos of the cotton revolution was no easy matter. Under the best of circumstances, the slave family on the frontier was extraordinarily unstable because the frontier plantation was extraordinarily unstable. For every aspiring master who climbed into the planter class, dozens failed because of undercapitalization, unproductive land, insect infestation, bad weather, or sheer incompetence. Others, discouraged by low prices and disdainful of the primitive conditions, simply gave up and returned home. Those who succeeded often did so only after they had failed numerous times. Each failure or near-failure caused slaves to be sold, shattering families and scattering husbands and wives, parents and children. Success, moreover, was no guarantee of security for slaves. Disease and violence struck down some of the most successful planters. Not even longevity assured stability, as many successful planters looked west for still greater challenges. Whatever the source, the chronic volatility of the plantation took its toll on the domestic life of slaves. Despite these difficulties, the family became the center of slave life in the interior, as it was on the seaboard. From the slaves' perspective, the most important role they played was not that of field hand or mechanic but husband or wife, son or daughter - the precise opposite of their owners' calculation. As in Virginia and the Carolinas, the family became the locus of socialization, education, governance, and vocational training. Slave families guided courting patterns, marriage rituals, child-rearing practices, and the division of domestic labor in Alabama, Mississippi, and beyond. Sally Anne Chambers, who grew up in Louisiana, recalled how slaves turned to the business of family on Saturdays and Sundays. 'De women do dey own washing den. De menfolks tend to de gardens round dey own house. Dey raise some cotton and sell it to massa and git li'l money dat way.' As Sally Anne Chambers's memories reveal, the reconstructed slave family was more than a source of affection. It was a demanding institution that defined responsibilities and enforced obligations, even as it provided a source of succor. Parents taught their children that a careless word in the presence of the master or mistress could spell disaster. Children and the elderly, not yet or no longer laboring in the masters' fields, often worked in the slaves' gardens and grounds, as did new arrivals who might be placed in the household of an established family. Charles Ball, sold south from Maryland, was accepted into his new family but only when he agreed to contribute all of his overwork 'earnings into the family stock.' The 'family stock' reveals how the slaves' economy undergirded the slave family in the southern interior, just as it had on the seaboard. As slaves gained access to gardens and grounds, overwork, or the sale of handicraft, they began trading independently and accumulating property. The material linkages of sellers and buyers - the bartering of goods and labor among themselves - began to knit slaves together into working groups that were often based on familial connections. Before long, systems of ownership and inheritance emerged, joining men and women together on a foundation of need as well as affection.
Ira Berlin (Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves)
I didn’t stay to hear it burn. He was no longer he; it was a body, an “it,” in a domestic incinerator beside a barn in a field beside a house at the end of a lane, off a minor road.
Liz Nugent (Strange Sally Diamond)
One day a fellow named Mike was telling me about renting the video Forrest Gump. “Boy, it was great!” he exclaimed. “Tom Hanks was brilliant, which is why he won the Oscar for Best Actor. I laughed and cried all the way through it. I know Brenda and you rent good movies for your kids. You should get this one. It was really clean and wholesome.” “Oh, I can’t watch Forrest Gump with my kids. In fact, I can’t even watch that myself, Mike,” I responded. Taken aback, Mike asked, “Why? It was a great movie!” “Well, do you remember that scene at the beginning where Sally Field has sex with the principal to get her son into the ‘right’ school?” “Uh…” “And how about the bare breasts at the New Year’s party? The nude on-stage guitar performance? And in the end, when Forrest finally ‘got the girl’ in the sex scene and she conceived a child out of wedlock? Sure, in the movie, everything worked out nicely for Forrest anyway. But that normally isn’t how life goes in those situations, so I don’t want to teach that to my kids. I don’t want them to hear all that grunting or see the nudity, either.
Stephen Arterburn (Every Man's Battle: Winning the War on Sexual Temptation One Victory at a Time)
The body-brain loop works both ways. Just as physical conditioning shores up the brain’s performance, the reverse can also be true: a mental drain can impact muscular endurance. One study of Italian soccer players showed that doing fatiguing brain teasers before going to the practice field made them commit more errors in controlling and passing the ball. Another study of twenty-one young boxers showed that too much time on phones playing video games affected their speed reactions in the ring.
Sally Jenkins (The Right Call: What Sports Teach Us About Work and Life)
Frank heard the glass of water thump on the stand that he now imagined might be beside the bed, which meant it was. Finally something firm to grasp, in his mind and with his hand. He reached out very slowly, as he didn’t want to risk tearing the gauze that was so precariously holding his vital organs together. He felt wood. His fingers slid shakily over the corners of the table, feeling their reality, their solidity. He tried to picture it in his head, all rough hewn and unpainted, but the white kept slipping in, even though he knew Mexicans rarely painted anything with a neutral color. Still, there it was, a whitewashed bed stand in his mind. He tried to overlook it, and reached up higher to find the glass cylinder full of what his body was screaming out for, water. That was why he felt so tight, he figured. His tissues and muscles had all dried up, and he needed to rehydrate them before even attempting to move. So at last, grasping the all important container, his fingers straining against its mighty heft, he slowly slipped it to and then off of the edge of the little table. Vast oceans of bluey refuge sloshed against their constraints, spilling their powerful waves over the side, across his sleeping hand, and onto the bed sheets below that were undoubtedly as white as Santa’s fucking beard. But the spill, the great cresting of the breakers over the levee walls, tremendous in its awesome power and glory, had only served to excite him, to intrigue him, the refreshment that the backside of his hand was lapping up osmotically served only to stoke the great thirst within him, and with God steadying his hand, he tipped his gauze laden head up, muscled the glass towards his mouth with veins rippling in his arms, and tipped it. It was not a perfect pour. Water splashed against his forehead, his eyes still clenched tightly in their death struggle against the white, as he had no idea where his mouth was at that point anyway. But he really didn’t give a shit where the life giving fluid went, for he had become a very gauzey sponge, and his tissues would reach their strange and parched tendrils across the entire room if they must to soak up the precious juices that would in turn dissolve their steely grip and allow him to rise from his low perch and sallie forth across the blue fields of agave that awaited a non-suicidal tourist’s itinerary, just outside the door he could not remember but which must surely be bolted to an opening that must surely be the gateway to the very room in which he must surely be attempting to drink.
Thomas Alton Gardner (Holy Tequila!: A Magical Adventure Under the Mexican Sun)
Maybe it was the smell of spring in the air; the field of four-leaf clovers we pass. Red roses against a fence. Leather seats and Josh’s skin.
Sally Thorne
She stared across the muster field where the bulk of the 7th formed up alongside the ochre shields of Lord Strazna’s Knights Fellnore, and the ragtag array of banners and shields Lady Sarravin had assembled. What had begun as a sally looked more and more like Ahrad’s last hope . . . assuming she could bring order to the ranks. To depart the gate as a mob would only invite slaughter, and leave the citadel bereft
Matthew Ward (Legacy of Steel (The Legacy Trilogy, #2))
So when Sally Fields, an old friend from high school,
Nikki Chase (The Five Brothers Next Door)
But I wasn't working regularly, and Steve had no career at all, so building a fantasy home at that particular moment couldn't have been a completely good idea either. Yet that's what Steve wanted to do: build a house. He was like a kid in a toy store, determined to get what he wanted. And no matter how many reasons I gave as to why we couldn't and shouldn't, he'd come back with reasons why we absolutely could and should: He would build half of it himself, be part of the construction crew, devote his life to it, stressing the point he knew all about finances and was positive it was a good investment. I wouldn't have known a good investment from a hole in the ground, plus I remained frightened of anything financial and therefore had no idea how much money we actually had. Part of me wanted to feel as if Steve knew what he was doing, that he could handle this part of our lives while I concerned myself with taking care of the kids and making a living. Which meant building a career, not a house.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
How you care for your child from the time they are born until they’re eighteen is important, but who you are as a person and parent for as long as you live also counts, and counts one hell of a lot.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
Then after the four-hundredth shove, with knees skinned and virginity compromised after slamming down on that damned "boys bar" again and again, I finally wobbled my way into the cycling world.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
The two boys did quite a lot of cycling, playing cycle polo in a field not far from Cooldrinagh, just as their father had done earlier in a team run by a man called Wisdom Healy.110 The scene in Beckett’s novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, where the two brothers go off on their bicycles to the sea, recalls a poignant memory of his childhood: That was in the blue-eyed days when they rode down to the sea on bicycles, Father in the van, his handsome head standing up out of the great ruff of the family towel, John in the centre, lean and gracefully seated, Bel behind, his feet speeding round in the smallest gear ever constructed. They were the Great Bear, the Big Bear and the Little Bear; aliter sic, the Big, Little and Small Bears … Many was the priest coming back safe from his bathe that they passed, his towel folded suavely, like a waiter’s serviette, across his arm. The superlative Bear would then discharge the celebrated broadside: B-P! B-P! B-P! and twist round with his handsome face wreathed in smiles in the saddle to make sure that the sally had not been in vain. It had never been known to be in vain.111
James Knowlson (Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett)
Burt
Sally Field (In Pieces)
More than that was the bottom-line fact that I didn’t want to play a cutesy version of a Catholic nun, wearing nothing but beige with never a thought of sex or a flirt with madness, two things that seemed much more interesting.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
When lift plus thrust is greater than load plus drag, anything can fly” was the piece of scientific information that Sister Bertrille would repeat at the drop of a hat, though hopefully not her own.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
The only episode I can remember actually being about something was the one where Sister Bertrille had to deal with Irving, a lovesick pelican, explaining gently that while she was very fond of him, she was not ready to settle down yet.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
Because not only did Sister Bertrille fly, she also sang, something that didn’t come naturally to me—not that flying did.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
Without feeling blazing rage or fear or sadness, I had asked for what I wanted. Getting it seemed secondary.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
and defensive and, most important, outraged. Furious for every moment in my life that I’d felt dismissed,
Sally Field (In Pieces)
One night she told me how much she had adored her father, loved being near him and felt proud to be the apple of his eye. But when Joy had found her sitting on his lap one day, she'd been furious, wordlessly accusing the little girl of trying to steal his affections. She told me that Joy had always been angry with her because of how much Baa and her father loved each other. It was because of that, my mother continued, that she couldn't be friends with women. Women always wanted to compete with her, she said, and she refused to compete, she wouldn't compete anywhere, and to some extent, that had ruined her career.
Sally Field (In Pieces)
Strasberg. But during the spring and throughout the summer Lee lived in L.A., and for those months it was the master himself who taught at this little neighborhood residence. The lights went down and the first scene was up. I wasn’t familiar with A Moon for the Misbegotten, but even if I’d known it well, I wouldn’t have completely understood what was happening because whatever the two actors were working on, being heard wasn’t one of them. It didn’t matter. Their focus made it worth holding my breath to catch whatever words I could, as if we, the audience, were eavesdropping on something personal happening between these two people, something that they would hide if our presence were known. After the scene, the actors gathered their things and adjusted their clothes, never looking out at the watchers, talking only to each other, as if allowing themselves the few moments it takes to leave the privacy of concentration. Tucking their emotions out of sight, just as they tucked in their shirts and tied their shoes. Eventually they sat on the edge of the stage with varying degrees of awkward composure until the moderator (I’m sorry to say I don’t remember who it was that night) asked them what they’d been working on. After the actors explained their tasks, the moderator gave comments and finally asked for comments from the audience—all actors and members or, like me, invited observers. When the short break ended, everyone took their seats again and quieted as a tall, striking woman, a character actor I vaguely recognized, moved to center stage, keeping her eyes down. She stood still for what seemed to be a long time, then began
Sally Field (In Pieces)
She stepped under the archway and into the graveyard, a contented sigh escaping her lips. She loved coming out here; it always felt so peaceful amongst the stones and weeds and feral cats that would wander between the graves hunting for field mice and spiders. Even though it was technically a place for the dead, being here always made Sally feel as if she were reborn.
Mari Mancusi (Sally's Lament)